Polar Rose: Image search will recognize faces
By George Gardner
Blorge has finally got its first sneak peak at the upcoming Polar Rose facial recognition plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer, and we must say it is certainly impressive.
Polar Rose claims its plug-in 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.”
It’s been nearly a year since I’ve exchanged e-mails with Mikkel Thagaard, VP of Business Development at Polar Rose and the sole person responsible for tagging ‘George Gardner’ in the Polar Rose search engine database. He assured me that I would receive a beta copy in due time.
Today, I have finally been given the gift of being an official beta tester and facial trainer (no jokes) for Polar Rose.
Once installed and activated, the plug-in will graciously wait for a web-page to load, right before scanning each image for faces. When the plug-in detects a face, or multiple faces, in an image, it will display a rose in the lower right hand corner of the face (shown right).
An orange and red rose will be displayed depending on whether the person is unrecognized or recognized by the system, respectively.
If a person is not found in the database, clicking the rose will display a flash-like popup (we like to call an inter-face) for you to tag a name to a particular face. If a person is recognized, you may click on the rose to view the name, agree or disagree with the name of the person, or click a link to view more images of the person.
While the plug-in does its best to recognize faces in an image, it does have trouble when matched against low quality and low light images. Although, more times than not, including partial images of a face, it will recognize a face in the crowd.
Polar Rose’s ability to pick out multiple faces within a single image is true testimony to the sheer power of this plug-in, and its likely to become very interesting after the database gets trained and the plug-in goes live.
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