Polar Rose, a facial recognition based search engine that allows you to find photos of people by their name, is getting ready to enter public beta. Yesterday I received an e-mail from them with my invite (at last, I was subscribed since around November 2006!), and their blog states that they have a “public beta coming up“.
Polar Rose works by having people tag images through a browser plugin (see picture to the right), and then 
building a model of that person using some sophisticated technology that came out of EU-backed research projects at the universities of Malmö and Lund in Sweden, where they are based. After their model gets good enough, Polar Rose is then able to automatically recognise who a face belongs to. It is even capable of recognizing all the people in a photo – searching for someone on the website tells you who they’ve been seen with lately (Barack Obama was seen with Rev. Jeremiah Wright much more than with Hillary Clinton, for instance).
Polar Rose seems to work great, but to become efficient it needs a lot of people tagging photos, and right now I don’t see much of an incentive to do that. Yes, I am using the plugin, but then I wil try out just about anything new that I can come across on the ‘net, which is not something you can expect most people to do. The technology itself is great, but right now they need to work on engaging users to build their index. And hey, if you want to get the web celebrities happy about you, then you really should recognize Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble (see the screenshot) 
