Polar Rose launching face-recognition service on web

Swedish company, Polar Rose, is planning to make its face recognition technology publicly available on the web in the second quarter of 2008.

The technology can identify faces from images on the Internet, allowing photographs to be indexed in the same way as text documents.

The free software for making photos searchable is available as a browser plug-in. From February, Polar Rose will start to integrate the system on partner sites.

At the moment, searches for pictures are carried out by scanning text attached to the image. This means that if the tagging is incorrect, or absent, the search will fail to find the image.

The new technology from Polar Rose scans the actual image, rather than the text, and converts the data from two-dimensional images into 3D models. The models are then rendered into “faceprints”, which are then stored and indexed.

The technology will allow people to search for similar photos, and to sort and group photos face by face.

A beta version of the system was launched last July.

Story link: Polar Rose launching face-recognition service on web