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Swedish company Polar Rose has announced that it will launch an industry first visual search engine for web based image searches.  With its successful $5.1 million Series A funding from Nordic Venture Partners last month, Polar Rose could make image searching a lot easier and more accurate through facial recognition and 3D imaging.  Polar will launch a beta version of its software in February next year.

They are also currently working on a plugin for Firefox and IE users. It will show a small photo symbol when the browser is opened - and when clicked, will use the Polar Rose service to look for matching photos in its database and tag them Flickr style.

The technology behind Polar Rose creates a virtual 3D image of a person, factoring out lighting and other conditions that can affect recognition. That 3D image is then used to try to guess when a person appears in a photo. The plugin, for example, will provide a link to try to find other images on the Internet of the person being tagged. At first, this data will be very thin. But if and when users adopt the Polar Rose plugin, the search feature could become a useful tool for finding additional pictures of people.

Read [Polar Rose] Via [Tech Crunch]

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