Polar Rose – giving meaning to web images
One of the most interesting companies of the next year must be Polar Rose, a swedish startup doing facial recognition.
Their idea is simple: They want to give meaning to each and every picture with people posing. In effect, they want to recognize each person of each photo on the web, and having seen their presentation at SIME a few months ago, I must say, they really might succeed.
A number of services have tried this before, but in my mind they were not really successful because of the labour the user would have to go through in order to tag each person. Polar Rose uses unique face recognition algorithms and the collective intelligence of our users to tag all pictures on the web. The only problem they are going to face is that their technology relies on a browser plugin (probably because they want to harness the collective data processing power as well, otherwise they could and would have built their front-end with JavaScript or as simple extensions), which they will have a hard time to get out to all users.
But very interesting indeed, be sure to sign up to their beta on the pages.
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Toumas,
Thanks for the kind words.
Actually, we’ll also be relying on data that is generated by users not using the plug-in, namely by licensing our APIs royalty free to other sites like photo-sharing services. People using these sites will have the Polar Rose functionality without needing the plug-in.
We’ll also release a javascript API which will allow a site owner to add Polar Rose functionality to any web page with photos.
(The plug-in btw is in fact just a Firefox extension — plug-in name used for broader understanding and across MS IE too. But of course it requires people to actively install it nonetheless)
Regards,
Nikolaj Nyholm (from Polar Rose)
model aeroplane wood congratulations