Are you a super recogniser? How people with 'exceptional' facial recognition skills help fight crime

• WATCH: ITV News Meridian's Jamie Green went along to find out more about super recognisers.

Thames Valley Police are employing people with exceptionally good facial recognition skills to help combat crime.

The specially trained team, known as super recognisers, have all passed a bespoke test designed to identify those who are outstanding at picking out faces from large groups.

Between 1% and 2% of the population are estimated to be super recognisers.

Thames Valley Police have recently become the first force in the country to use super recognisers to help identify known sex offenders as part of a national initiative to tackle sexual violence.

Alex Thorburn is one of the super recognisers. She completes the work alongside her existing job for the force.

She said: "Whenever I would walk down the street and I'd say 'I went to school with them' twenty odd years ago, they would never recognise me.

"Watching a film I can recognise somebody I'd seen years before, so I knew I could remember faces, but didn't necessarily know it meant anything."

After passing the test, Alex completed training at the Oracle shopping centre in Reading, where they were identify people based on old photos. She identified every person correctly.

The term 'super recogniser' originated in the US, but Mike Neville and Professor Josh Davis worked together to develop the concept in the UK, where Thames Valley Police is among a select number of forces to use them.

Mike Neville said super recognisers could be used in a number of situations.

"They would be very useful at football matches, where there's banned fans and known hooligans - people involved in racist chanting who need to be kept out of the ground".

Professor Davis added that although technology is rapidly developing, the human eye still has a clear advantage.

"We don't want a machine to tell us that this person has committed a crime. We want a human being to check."

Mike Neville had a word of warning for anyone looking to develop their super recognising skills.

"You simply can't learn it - you've either got it or you've not", he said.

But for anyone who thinks they might be among the 2% of super recognisers, Alex Thorburn has a clear message.

She said: "If you walk down the street and you're really good at recognising people... then definitely do the test because it might be that you can help somebody."