Stefan Arentz

While I’m enjoying my holiday in sunny southern california, drinking peach margaritas, my hard working collegues in icey Warsaw and Malmö have put a GREAT new version of the Polar Rose web site online!

This new release is a major accomplishment for us because it is the first time we are showing off our Face Matching features.

We’ve always had Face Finding, which allows us to find faces in an image. Using Face Finding we have already collected more than 4.2 million faces from public images on the web. Mostly images that people browse with our Firefox extension.

Matching builds on top of the Face Finding and the database of faces that we have found. It allows us to group faces that look similar. Previously we did that by using solely the name that was added to the face. Now with Face Matching we can do the grouping by using the discovered face characteristics.

Because we haven’t fully figured out how to apply this to the 4.2 million faces that we have found so far, we have enabled this just for some smaller collections of faces, like the face galleries/albums that we host for events.

A good example can be found in the SIME’07 gallery. Here is an image of Jan Erik, father of Polar Rose.

If you have seen Polar Rose before then this should look familiar:

The bottom off this screen (which we call the ‘hit page’) is the part where we show faces that are possible matches for the main face that is being shown. These matches all have a score, which is calculated by cominging the face characteristics of all faces in the match group. When you hover over a face you will be given the option to confirm or reject the match. This will improve the overal score for the matching and make it more accurate.

Cool Stuff!