When you’re a cop in a country of 1.3 billion people, playing hide-and-seek with suspected criminals can be a daunting task.

Researchers at a Chinese university say they have the solution: drive-and-seek.

A team at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China’s Police Equipment Joint Research Lab have developed a high-tech vehicle for police equipped with a facial-recognition system that can pick criminal suspects out of a crowd, state media reported this week.

The SUV, unveiled in the southwestern city of Chengdu on Wednesday, is mounted with a 360-degree rooftop camera array that automatically scans faces within a 60-meter radius, according to the state-run Sichuan Daily (in Chinese).

The system determines the gender, age and race of each face, compares it against faces stored in the police database, and alerts the driver if a match is made -- all while traveling at speeds of up to 120 kilometers per hour (75mph) -- according the reports.

“As long as you get at least three-quarters of the face, you can make an ID,” Yin Guangqiang, director of the Police Equipment Joint Research Lab, told the newspaper. He added that the system can also recognize license plate numbers and car types, and can be set to scan for just “one type of person.”

Despite a domestic security budget on par with the country’s military budget and a robust law-enforcement equipment industry, China has appeared content to let its police roll around on modest wheels. Most vehicles, as Mr. Yin noted in his pitch to reporters, are commercial cars lightly retrofitted for police use.

Once the stuff of science fiction films, facial recognition increasingly showing up in hands of police around the world. While its use has sparked privacy and other concerns in the U.S., the idea of face-scanning police cars seems unlikely to encounter much opposition in China, a country already outfitted with around 100 million surveillance cameras.

In addition to face-scanning abilities, the vehicle also has sensors in the trunk that will alert officers if any of its 39 pieces of police equipment have gone missing, according to TV footage of the unveiling.

The vehicle is scheduled to be road-tested in Hangzhou when the coastal city hosts the G-20 Summit later this year.

China is not the only country hoping to put a mobile face-scanning police unit on the road in the near future. Turkey’s ekin Technology announced in November that it had signed a deal with the Abu Dhabi Police Department to provide it with 250 of its ekin Patrol cars, which the company says are also able to read faces at high speeds.

-- Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin.