Pinpointing pictures

Swedish company Polar Rose will soon be introducing a Web-based search engine that can find photographs of people by analysing pictures and identifying faces. The search engine, which Polar Rose claims will be the first of its kind in the world, is the result of research carried out by Solem at the Technology and Society department at Malmö University College.

Solem is part of a research team in applied mathematics working with image analysis and computer vision. In his dissertation he shows how computers can be made, through mathematical processes, to create 3D models of objects or persons on the basis of regular photographs.

According to Solem, it is a matter of calculating where the camera was positioned in relation to the object and then doing the geometry.

‘For faces it’s possible in principle to create 3D data on the basis of a single photograph, but most often we have worked with 5-10 still photos or with film sequences,’ said Solem.