Apple Buys Polar Rose Facial Recognition Company? [Update]

Apple may have acquired all the shares of facial recognition company Polar Rose, according to a report by Mac1.

The company offers three different products. Two of them (Face Cloud and FaceLib) seem to be very interesting for Apple.


Face Cloud is a scalable server-side solution to add facial recognition to nearly all types of Web services. One can, for example, easily imagine Face Cloud can be used to introduce face recognition in images that are uploaded to Mobile Me - a service that does not exist today.

FaceLib is the same face recognition just moved to a mobile phone. FaceLib can either work together with Face Cloud or can make facial recognition directly on your mobile phone - such as an iPhone. FaceLib Polar Rose has developed for both the iPhone and Android today.

A note on the company's website reads, "Our free face tagging service is now closed. We are now focusing solely on licensing our technology. Hopefully you'll see our tech in one of our licensees' products in the future!"

Check out the Polar Rose demo video below...


Update:
TechCrunch says "we have rock-solid sources that say the company went for $22 million. Polar Rose has had about $6 million in VC funding since 2006."

[via 9to5Mac]