Polar Rose offers facial recognition search engine
Technology turns a 2D image into a 3D face print; search can be used to locate additional photographs of or identify an unknown person; privacy concerns an issue
Imagine holding a photograph of a person whom you did not know but wished to identify — a pretty girl, perhaps, or the object of a private investigation. In the old days, you might ask others to help, but without any personal information knowing where to begin would be difficult. Thank goodness those days are past. A new search engine offered by Polar Rose now allows people to search for additional pictures of individuals based only on a single photograph.
Unlike traditional search engines, which handle only text, Polar Rose relies on facial recognition technology to reconstruct a “face print” by generating a 3D image of a person’s face from a 2D photograph. The print can then be used to search other photos for a match. Scan in a 1987 Jose Canseco baseball card, and Polar Rose will return all pictures of Canseco on the Internet. Or, if you do not know who the picture is of, search results no doubt will have an identifying tag. Polar Rose’s technique will recognise people even when the pose or lighting has changed — so long as the face at least 100 pixels (35 millimetres) across.
-read more in Tom Simonite’s New Scientist report
