Apple Buys Swedish Facial Recognition Firm

pple has purchased Swedish computer vision startup Polar Rose, which makes facial recognition software Apple could leverage in a competitor to Google Goggles.

Polar Rose offers computer vision software, or applications that use complex algorithms to identify and derive meaning from images instead of text.

The company ceased offering its free tagging system on Flickr and Facebook on 6 September, citing “interest by larger companies in licensing our technology”.

Visual cues

In as close to a confirmation as Apple is going to get, a spokesperson for the company told eWEEK: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans.”

The news was discovered by Norwegian blog Mac1. US blog 9 to 5 Mac picked up on it as well.

According to a translation to English via Google Translate, Mac1 said Polar Rose’s software is similar to Apple’s software for Google’s Picasa or iPhoto for Mac OS X.

However, Polar Rose said on its website that its technology also “enables automatic creation of events based on visual cues in images”. The company offers three core products for this.

The FaceCloud server platform allows social networks and other vendors to add facial recognition to any web service. The FaceLib mobile face recognition library for Google’s Android platform and Apple’s iPhone. FaceCore is Polar Cloud’s core face detection and recognition module, which other companies would plug into their solutions.

The company also sports a web-based photo-sharing system, a mobile photo browser, photo event creation and the augmented ID technology Recognizr.

Anyone of those technologies could be useful to Apple, which is hungrily trying to expand its influence on the web.

Computer vision

Apple could be particularly interested in appropriating FaceLib for its iPhone or iPad as an alternative to and leg up on Google’s Goggles computer vision app.

Goggles lets users with Android smartphones search by snapping pictures of locations, such as landmarks, objects such as wine bottles and other merchandise, or even art.

Goggles has yet to make its way onto the iPhone, a common hold-up for applications trying to find their way into Apple’s scrupulous App Store.

The Polar Rose buy might be a good indication as to why, providing a differentiator for Apple. As GigaOm noted, Google has been reluctant to imbibe Goggles with facial recognition technology until it hashes out how to handle user privacy.

Theoretically, Goggles with added facial recognition could let users snap photos from smartphones of users on the street and call up information about that person from Facebook, LinkedIn or other information sources.

With Polar Rose Apple could seek to provide this technology for its millions of iPhone and iPad users. It could also use the photo-sharing system, mobile photo browser and augmented ID technology to boost its popular smartphone.

Whatever Apple does, it is certainly to be geared toward leveraging facial recognition for the mobile web in a manner that captures Google’s attention.