Italian police have recovered stolen art and antiquities worth more than $200 million with the help of an artificial intelligence system that can recognise looted works even when they have been altered to disguise them. The Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Italy's art crime squad, has been running the system, known as SWOADS, since 2023.

The platform was developed by Salvatore Rapicavoli, an information technology engineer who joined the art crime team in 2023. It compares photographs against a database of stolen works, looking for what its developer describes as hidden visual fingerprints, matching shades of colour and rough silhouettes that a human eye might miss.

Its best-known success came in the autumn of 2024, when officers visited Mercanteinfiera, a long-running antiques fair that draws exhibitors from across Europe. Photographs they took there were run through the system, which flagged an image of a young woman holding a scroll. The painting proved to be a close match for a 17th-century portrait of Saint Agnese taken from the small church of Virgo Potens in Sulmona, in the Abruzzo region, some twenty years earlier. In the intervening years the lamb the saint had been cradling was painted over with a scroll carrying Latin text, a change that had hidden the work's identity from human viewers. The painting was returned to the Diocese of Sulmona-Valva in May 2025.

According to figures reported by the BBC, SWOADS has so far led to the recovery of more than 300 large paintings and statues, along with more than 165,000 smaller objects such as coins, letters and medals. The people who stole the Saint Agnese painting have not been caught.