Aged appearance of a missing child generated using artificial intelligence (AI) technology (Image courtesy of the National Center for the Rights of Children)
SEOUL, Dec. 9 (Korea Bizwire) — On a public bulletin board outside the Namdaemun police substation in central Seoul, posters show faces of missing children — not only as they once appeared decades ago, but as they likely look today.
A 13-year-old boy missing since the late 1980s is pictured as a man in his 50s; a missing 14-year-old girl has similarly aged into a middle-aged woman in the rendering.
The images are the product of South Korea’s expanding use of artificial intelligence to aid search efforts for long-term disappearance cases. Developed by the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), the system uses machine learning to simulate age progression with a level of detail previously available only through costly U.S. contractors, whose output often required a month or more.
Since 2015, KIST has localized the technology, and rapid advances in AI over the past two years — including super-resolution image enhancement — have quadrupled the clarity of age-progressed portraits.
The algorithms learn how facial features evolve across a lifespan and apply those patterns to photographs taken at the time of disappearance.
A poster of a missing child displayed in front of the Namdaemun police substation
As children move through adolescence, the system captures predictable changes: boys develop more angular jawlines, girls shift toward softer oval shapes, and noses lengthen and rise. In midlife, wrinkles, age spots and more squared jawlines appear.
KIST researchers trained the model on broad population data to extract age-specific characteristics and integrate them into a missing child’s original photo.
AI now extends beyond facial changes alone. Clothing and hairstyles — once manually selected from limited databases — can now be generated dynamically by the model, dramatically accelerating production and helping ensure portraits feel realistic in the present day.
The Korea National Center for the Rights of Children, which manages long-term disappearance cases with police and the Health Ministry, has used AI to create updated images for 60 of the 189 long-missing children under its care.
As of last year, 1,417 children and disabled individuals remained missing for more than a year, including 1,128 cases unresolved for more than two decades.
Artificial intelligence is also proving effective in short-term search efforts. In Anyang, a pilot “AI movement-tracking” system recently helped locate an elderly dementia patient and a young man who appeared at risk of self-harm. The tool memorizes identifying features from reported cases and simultaneously scans multiple CCTV feeds to track likely movements.
The technology has been transferred to telecom company KT, and police agencies and local governments nationwide are considering broader deployment, citing the potential to transform time-critical search operations.
Lina Jang (linajang@koreabizwire.com)
