At Polar Rose we use computer vision to analyze the content of online photos and recognize the people in them.

Recognizing people in photos is a great challenge because the computer must interpret the photos to extract information above a pure pixel-level, something we humans do easily every day. The main problems when working with general photos are changes in lighting and pose which have great effect on the appearance of a face in a photo.

To cope with this our software creates a virtual 3D portrait of a person so that we can factor out and compensate for these effects. The technology is based on computer vision research for computing 3D data using ordinary photos. Statistical relationships between what can be observed in the 2D photos and how this relates to the possible 3D shape variations gives us a way to get 3D using a single picture. Even if this 3D portrait is just an approximation and not a measurement it is a very good one which adds significant boost to recognition.

Here’s a screenshot of our good friend Ola Ahlvarsson as his 2D picture is converted into a 3D portrait. View the entire screen recording here.