14 DAY TRIAL // In the past 12 hours, a company dealing with facial recognition has made multiple headlines for reportedly being acquired by Apple Inc. The details of the deal have not been disclosed officially but “rock-solid” sources cited by TechCrunch say Apple paid around $29 million to take over the entire shareholding of Polar Rose.
“Polar Rose grew out of computer vision research - the analysis of digital images and video - at the Universities of Lund and Malmö in southern Sweden,” according to the company’s profile found on CrunchBase.
“We are currently a team of 17, including computer science graduates, mathematics Ph.Ds, a user interface designer, and a technology-fascinated economist on off-roads.”
Via its face-recognition technology, Polar Rose helps users sort, search, and share their digital photos based on the photo content. It uses superior computer vision technology tell who’s in a photo, much like Apple’s own Faces feature in iPhoto.
Seemingly, Apple believes it can do more in the field, perhaps implement even more accurate algorithms to achieve the best results.
One feature may be of particular interest to Apple - the Recognizr concept for "augumented ID" in Polar Rose's FaceLib technology.
Polar Rose has actually been co-developing this functionality with another company. A video demonstration of the concept has been uploaded to YouTube (embedded below).
Undoubtedly tied to the Apple acquisition is the announcement issued by Polar Rose last month, when it said it would shut down its consumer-focused Flickr and Facebook tagging product.
A week later, it announced that it would be shutting down its entire free face-tagging service, MacRumors reports.
The company accused an inability to cope with customer requests, and that it needed to focus its resources on face recognition technology.
As the rumor-site points out, it appears the move was actually tied to Apple’s pending acquisition of its intellectual property.