Facial recognition software makes finding Web photos easier
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Polar Rose AB plans to offer free software to make photos searchable on computers and across the Web by analyzing the contents of pictures with facial recognition technology to locate specific faces.
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Science & environment: Scientists develop technique which improves the success rate of computer face-recognition systems
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DAVOS, Switzerland  - Swedish start-up Polar Rose  plans to make its face recognition service publicly available  on the Web in the second quarter of 2008 as it tries to become  a must-have tool for sorting visual content.
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A new website provides an innovative tool that expands and contracts images while minimizing  distortion.
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A great way for Windows users to organize lots (and lots) of photos
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A slick, intuitive web based photo gallery. Gallery is easy to install, configure and use. Gallery photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and more. Authenticated users and privileged albums make this great for communities.   Gallery is an online photo album organizer. Whether for small personal sites or large community sites, Gallery provides an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into any website. Serving millions worldwide, Gallery is the most widely used system of its kind. Gallery is free to download and use.  Gallery 2.2.3 is now available for download. This release adds no new features. It fixes critical application security bugs in the WebDAV and Reupload modules. If the WebDAV or Reupload modules are active in your Gallery we strongly recommend that you either disable them, upgrade them via Downloadable Plugins or perform a complete upgrade to version 2.2.3. Thanks go to Merrick Manalastas and Nicklous Roberts for reporting the issues to the Gallery Security team!  Get all the details at:  http://gallery.menalto.com/gallery_2.2.3_released
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(InfoWorld) - A Swedish company will launch an Internet search technology next month that uses 3D modeling to find photos of people based on their facial features. Millions of photos are added to Web sites such as Flickr.com and others daily, but only the text metadata is searchable, which is often misleading, said Nikolaj Nyholm, chief executive officer of Polar Rose . The MalmÃ¶, Sweden, company, founded in November 2004, was working with Western European governments who were interested in the technology for law enforcement. But Nikolaj said the company decided in March to end that work and make the technology widely available. Polar Rose uses software spiders to mine the Internet for photos of faces as well as accompanying text. When a face is found, 90 different measurements are taken, based on 3D data and texture characteristics, Nikolaj said. A 90-character alphanumeric string is then created. Faces with as few as 100 pixels can be recognized. Polar Rose uses Amazon.com Inc.'s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) data-processing service, Nikolaj said. The data is then sent to Polar Rose's databases in Denmark and Sweden. The company is currently building up a larger database of photos across the Internet. Polar Rose is also creating a plugin for the Firefox and Internet Explorer Web browsers. The plugin, which the company expects to release by February, pops up a small symbol when the browser opens a Web page containing a photo of a face. When a user clicks on the symbol, the Polar Rose service looks for matching photos in its database, Nikolaj said. Users also can tag existing photos in the database to help train Polar Rose's matching engine. Photos marked as private -- for example, in photo-sharing services -- can't be searched. The accuracy of the application is between 92 percent to 95 percent in controlled environments with image sets of no larger than 10,000, Nikolaj said. The accuracy declines with larger sets because people start to look alike, he said. But then the search engine uses metadata associated with that person's face to come up with a ranking of selections, which are then displayed in a browser window, Nikolaj said. "We really see this as harnessing our users' collective intelligence," Nikolaj said. Polar Rose will license its APIs (application programming interfaces) royalty-free to its partners, Nikolaj said. Its first partner, a European photo-sharing site, will be announced in January, he said. "Flickr is probably a good model for who we want to reach," Nikolaj said. "We'd love to work with them, obviously." The plugin will work independently of whether a Web site has implemented the Polar Rose technology. But Polar Rose sees partner arrangements as a way to eventually incorporate contextual ads, Nikolaj said. For example, if a person is searching for a photo of Bono from the band U2, links to an MP3 seller could appear, he said. In mid-January, Polar Rose will release a preview program, called Limelight, that uses the same technology as its forthcoming plugin. After a person has uploaded two photos of themselves to Polar Rose's database and supplied their Flickr ID, Limelight will find photos of that person in the person's Flickr friends. Limelight can then e-mail the results or supply them via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, Nikolaj said. Â
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New facial-recognition software for handheld computers, which amounts to a portable mug book, is being field-tested by Los Angeles police. Civil liberties advocates warn privacy and accuracy are key issues.
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Gallery is a slick, intuitive web based photo gallery with authenticated users and privileged albums. Easy to install, configure and use. Photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, etc. User privileges make this great for communities.  Gallery 1.4.4-pl2 is an update to Gallery 1.4.4-pl1 that addresses two issues discovered after the release. Skins will now work properly in all situations and extra long filenames for uploaded files are now handled properly.   Download 1.4.4-pl1 from http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7130  Visit http://gallery.sourceforge.net/article.php?sid=135 for more details.
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University of California scientists use a Google widget to improve automatic image cataloging in large collections like the Library of Congress. It'll add "common sense" to computers' ability to recognize objects in photographs, by adding a semantic context to object recognition.
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Review Fingerprint-scanning prototype
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Could this be an end to broken links? New software replaces and updates links on Web pages.
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Consumers are embracing camera features that make them look thinner and more youthful. But what about society's trust in photography? Photos: Camera makeovers
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Aaron Wormus has a quick note on his site about one of the up and coming web services availible out there - flickr.
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Teaching search engines to see Web pages the way people do could improve their performance.
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Photographers can shoot, store and print digital photos without requiring a computer connection.
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A free plug-in lets photographers create sorted lists of necessary gear for photo shoots. Plus, Microsoft makes it easier to find raw image codecs.