Today we released some new features to the Polar Rose website and plugin – detection of duplicate images, statistics and a new functionality in the plugin to make it easier to notify us about bugs.

Duplicates

Duplicate detection means that multiple versions of the same image are grouped together – making it easier for you to get an overview of results for a particular person.

Simply click the link shown above an image that has duplicates and you will open a page showing all the duplicates – even if some images have been cropped, scaled or had other modifications made to them they will still be shown on this page.

When you browse the page of duplicates of an image you can also see all the different websites that the image has be found at.

Statistics

Under the search field on the Polar Rose home page there are now links to pages that show the most popular searches, most named people and the top users on Polar Rose.

Flag as bug

The Polar Rose plugin now includes a checkbox which allows you to quickly and easily flag bugs (roses that appear on things other than faces). Doing this helps us to improve our face recognition and show better results when you search on the Polar Rose website.

Today we release a new site with a cleaner simpler look & feel. The main focus of this release is improved search functionality including clustered search results (stacks as we like to call them) based on facial similarity.

The Polar Rose plugin is now available for Internet Explorer (version 7) so please try it out and report any bugs that you find! We also made some modifications to the plugin user interface to bring it in line with the new site look.

User interface improvements…

The main goal of the user interface re-design was to make searching and browsing results easier and more intuitive. We also wanted to simplify the other interaction points (forms, settings etc.) and the plugin user interface. Finally we wanted to create a user interface which is easier to expand upon and add new functionality to.

Look out for an upcoming post with more about the future user interface developments we are working on.

Under the hood…

We have built a new flexible and scalable infrastructure to support increased numbers of users – more beta invites will be sent out soon! We also now utilize a content delivery network (CDN) to make the output of search queries faster.

In closing…

Todays release represents a lot of hard work by the whole team at Polar Rose and we all look forward to your feedback and comments. We are already busy designing and developing many improvements and new features which we will be releasing over the coming weeks and months!