Norwegian website Mac1 is reporting that Apple has bought all the shares of a Swedish company called “Polar Rose”, which specializes in face recognition softwares more advanced than Apple’s implementation in iPhoto.
As you can see in the video embedded below, the “Recognizr” app from Polar Rose can save face information in seconds and link a person to various social profiles on the internet such as Flickr and Youtube. It’s demoed on a Samsung phone, but we wonder (if true) what this acquisition might bring to our devices in the future. A more capable iPhoto? Perhaps that user tracking patent we heard about a few weeks ago? We’ll see. But I’m pretty sure that this is definitely mobile-oriented. [via 9to5mac]
Google translation:
The Malmö-based company specializes in developing technology which makes facial recognition, not unlike what Apple already has and uses iPhoto for Mac OS X. Through sophisticated algorithms, manages the software of the Arctic Rose to recognize faces in images and the company offers three different products using this solution. Two of the (Face Cloud and FaceLib) them seem to be very interesting for Apple.
UPDATE: TechCrunch confirms Apple acquired Polar Rose for $22 million.
