Polar Rose, a photo tagging startup we wrote about during its private launch, has released a new version of its application that lets you name and tag people in your photos on your Flickr account using your Facebook contacts. Polar Rose will detect people in your photos, let you name the people using your Facebook contact list, and then suggest tags of other photos that include your Facebook contacts.
Polar Rose’s technology employs a browser plugin to allow users to tag people in photos anywhere on the web. The startup uses those photos to construct a 3D image of the person, and then make educated guesses as to who is in untagged photos. The new version of Polar Rose will notify that friend on Facebook who has been tagged in a Flickr photo that they’ve been named in your photos. Your friends can decide if they want their name in public or not (until they sign up and decide for themselves, Polar Rose keeps their identity them private).
Unfortunately, Polar Rose’s most recent blog post says that the application is “experiencing a delay in import of photos from Flickr.”
Polar Rose’s new technology is compelling but they may have been beat to the punch by Google’s Picasa. Picasa launched facial recognition technology last fall. The latest version of Picasa asks you identify people in your pictures that you haven’t tagged yet. Once you do and start uploading more pictures, Picasa suggests tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them. This is similar to Polar Rose’s application which suggests photos based on your previous tags of Facebook friends. And Face.com is a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends.
Riya tried facial recognition this but shifted its focus to ecommerce via Like.com. So did Ookles but the startup never launched. Google also threw in the towel on its image labeler. TagCow integrates with Flickr and uses humans to tag photos. But Polar Rose seems to be doing something new with the joint integration of Flickr and Facebook Connect. Making sense out of photos via facial recognition is still a technology that needs to be perfected but Polar Rose is worth a look. That is, when it actually starts working.
the Flickr photos take a few minutes to load, but I’m using PolarRose.com to successfully identify my Facebook friends in my Flickr photos right now.
Apple iPhoto ‘09 also has similar technology.
The thing that is interesting about Polar Rose is that their approach is a distributed model that will work with any photo host in the future. Flickr is simply the starting point.
Ever since Picasa and iPhoto ‘09 released facial recognition, I’ve been wondering when a way to do Flickr would come about.
This seems to be a better solution than even if Flickr did it in house, since we can not aggregate data from Facebook. Props to the Polar Rose team, I’ll definitely have to test this out.
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Ok .. this time.. I’m pretty impressed. congrats to Polar Rose
FYI the old beta of Polar Rose used a plugin the new Polar Rose released today does not – it imports the users photos from Flickr, other photo sharing sites will be added in upcoming releases.
interesting. Just tried it. Our web server is currently unable to process your request due to temporary overloading or maintenance, please try again – (error code 503).
I think you’ll like it Thomas, give it a try after the TC traffic spike dies down.
They’re running into issues with limits on the Flickr API. Will post here when that changes…
I’ve been waiting for a couple hours for it to find my Flickr photos.
It hasn’t found any yet…
it just doesn’t freaking work? not only the flickr integration but also keeps identifying backgrounds as faces?
Just a quick note to clarify that Flickr is not throttling access to their APIs. We are investigating where the bottlenecks are.
Sorry for any confusion on this matter.
- Nikolaj Nyholm (CEO, Polar Rose)
I have been wondered why all these high-end research companies including Polar Rose which involve in state-of-the-art research in rocket science topics as computer vision do develop and target application for web use? First of all it is a waste of time and useless because there is no obvious advantage (monetization).
Computer vision application makes tons of money targeting industrial & automation domain. For example, there is a local company here in New Zealand call Compac Sort that develops state-of-the-art computer-vision-based industrial system that automatically sorts fruits. Fruit sorting used to be done manually (ie, by humans), but now humans are being made redundant as machines can now see (artificial eyes or vision) and judge good fruits which are to be packaged from the bad ones that are to be eliminated.
Compac Sort have got some installations in California and they’re growing fast internationally especially in North America. See, this is useful application of computer-vision which definitely gets huge revenue potential. In web application of computer vision, it is useless and a waste of technology use. It is also a waste of brains in developing something cutting edge like that to be used in time-wasting online social networkings.
If those brains who are doing/developing computer vision application think outside of Facebook (a time-wasting application), then they will have huge earning potentials.
Woah! This is freaking amazing!
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dating site ___ TallMeet…………………….com
___ for dating~ ,seems it’s such a
waste being here!!lol…..
still not working??? i only get some of my flickr images and tagging doesn’t work.
@Jeff @Pat Hawks and other users who experienced problems with getting photos to appear on Polar Rose. We released a fix earlier today that should make your photos appear (and this time all of them!) much quicker.
For more details, see our blog post about the fix:
http://blog.pol...-flickr-import/
For quick updates, follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/polarrose
Sorry for any inconvenience caused by this,
/Jan Erik Solem (Polar Rose CTO)
i am using free embed code at http://phototag....com/online.php , it is easy for me.