1. A system comprising: a database storage; at least one processor; and at least one memory coupled to the at least one processor having stored thereon instructions which, when executed by the at least one processor, causes the at least one processor to perform operations comprising: managing, in the database storage, a) data for persons on a watch list sorted using similarity scores for a reference image that represent, for each of the persons on the watch list, a similarity between the reference image and an image of the person and b) associations to biometric data for each of the persons on the watch list; accessing two or more images of a potential suspect; determining at least one criterion relevant to the image of the potential suspect based on at least one of sensor or camera data; selecting types of operations to perform in parallel pre-processing based on the at least one criterion; controlling parallel pre-processing of the two or more images of the potential suspect to enhance a quality of each of the two or more images using the selected types of operations to perform in the parallel pre-processing; determining an image of the potential suspect to use in computing a similarity score that represents similarity between the image of the potential suspect and the reference image based on the pre-processing; computing a similarity score that represents a similarity between the determined image of the potential suspect and the reference image based on selecting the reference image; searching the watch list using the computed similarity score; identifying, using a result of the search of the watch list using the computed similarity score, a subset of persons on the watch list each having a similarity score within a threshold of the computed similarity score for the reference image; determining whether the potential suspect matches a person in the subset of the persons on the watch list; and outputting a result based on determining whether the potential suspect matches a person in the subset of the persons on the watch list.