Artificial intelligence will take on the gruelling task of scanning for images of child abuse on suspects' phones and computers so that police officers are no longer subjected to psychological trauma within "two to three years".

The Metropolitan Police's digital forensics department, which last year trawled through 53,000 different devices for incriminating evidence, already uses image recognition software but it is not sophisticated enough to spot indecent images and video, Mark Stokes, the Met's head of digital and electronics forensics, told the Telegraph.

"We have to grade indecent images for different sentencing, and that has to be done by human beings right now, but machine learning takes that away from humans," he said.

"You can imagine that doing that for year-on-year is very disturbing."

The force is currently drawing up an ambitious plan to move its sensitive data to cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google or Microsoft, Mr Stokes said.

This would allow specialists to harness the tech giants' massive computing power for analytics. The Met currently use a London based data centre but the sheer volume of images along with the popularity of high resolution video is putting pressure on resources.