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Finding Photos Made Easier Over Web

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DQI Bureau
New Update

A photo says many stories, but unlike text, the context of a

photo is hard to search for unless explicitly "translated" by a human

being. The photo web of today is like the text web before Google came into the

picture. Sweden-based Polar Rose will make photos searchable by analyzing their

content and recognizing the people in them. The company intends to offer free

software to make photos of familiar faces searchable on both personal computers

and on the web by analyzing the contents of pictures with pattern recognition

technology to locate specific faces within them.

It would allow users to annotate photos with descriptive

details, using the web to improve what can be done with computational searching

alone on sites like Google or Yahoo. Polar Rose, which takes its name from a

flower-shaped mathematical curve used to plot two-dimensional coordinates, will

help consumers label any photo and thereby make it easier to search for related

photos of same or similar-looking people. In simple terminology, Polar Rose will

help the computer user to sort through and group his personal photos face by

face. More broadly, the software can also search for similar-looking photos

across the web. The software analyzes digital photos to locate faces then

converts the data from two-dimensional (2D) images into 3D models. These

skeletal models can be rendered into what scientists call "faceprints."

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