Face-Off: New Software Recognizes Faces on Web
Dec. 20, 2006 — -- Let's say you've uploaded your holiday photos to a picture-sharing Web site, and you want to mark all the ones that include your cousin George.
Or you're doing some research, and you want to find pictures of a young Bill Gates.
Or, perhaps, you wonder about a long-lost love, and you'd like to see where he or she has gone since you broke up.
A Swedish startup company, Polar Rose AB, has now announced a face-recognition program that it hopes will make the countless millions of photos on the Web more searchable.
And it's free; the firm hopes to make money through advertising.
"Social networking on the Web is very popular, and very visual," said Mikkel Thagaard, vice president for business development at Polar Rose. "It's not usually searchable."
The solution offered by Polar Rose uses the kind of face-recognition software that, at a more detailed level, is used by law enforcement agencies and governments trying to track down terrorists.
Such software was used by Canadian police trying to solve a murder mystery that dates back nearly 40 years.
Using a face-recognition program, Ontario Provincial Police said on Tuesday that they'd identified a body that had been found in 1968 in a rural area northwest of Toronto.
Matching the body to old photos, they announced the victim was Richard Hovey, a 17-year-old musician who had disappeared from a Bohemian Toronto neighborhood in 1967.
Hovey's relatives released a statement saying they were "very relieved to be able to bring our brother home after years of anguish."
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