Lockergnome: Polar Rose Launches Visionary Search For Online Photos: December 21, 2006
A company has combined automatic race recognition with 3D modeling into a visual search application and has announced an open beta trial, to begin in Q1 of 2007. The company is Polar Rose.
Using Polar Rose’s technology, it will now be possible to automatically search for and recognize faces on a consistent basis similar to the way people do - by using the visual cues of the photo as opposed to nearby text analysis. The company’s unique technology creates a 3D model from a single 2D image of a face. This approach radically improves photo matching by compensating for variations in lighting, facial emotions and pose.
It seems that this will be available as a free Web browser plug-in and through royalty-free API’s. Where as today if you do an image search on a particular persons name you will get many pictures of strangers with that same name or even other object images tagged with that name. With this new technology the search would logically only return those that closely matched the face of the individual that you wanted.
Potential application mentioned for this search capability would include:
    * Search for more photos of the same person on specific sites or across the whole Internet
    * Collectively add information and tag people in online photos
    * Automatically sort their online photos by the people appearing in them
    * Be alerted when new photos matching visual search criteria appear
    * On a news site such as cnn.com, to find additional or supplemental information about any of the people photographed in the story - transparently and without disrupting the cnn.com user experience.
    * On social networking or dating sites such as MySpace or match.com, to find people matching specific looks and to receive feeds of certain types of images from their friends’ photo albums.
    * For an online photo album, to categorize hundreds or thousands of photos automatically by face, as well as finding local or global matches and searching/sharing feeds from friends.
    * For a conference the viewer will be able to get or put information on the people appearing on the photo documentation site of the conference. This will help anybody finding a name to a face or visa versa.
I can personally think of a few uses not mentioned.
* Searching the internet for any photos that might contain the faces of known terrorist.
* Searching the internet for any photos of your future wife or husband in case there was something they hadn’t told you yet.
* Searching the Internet Social Sites for anyone that may be using your photo as their own.
* Searching the Internet to try and find the identify of people found but not identified.
In any regards it sounds like some very interesting technology if it can be made to work fairly swiftly and reliably.
Technorati Tags: polar rose, search, visual
