9to5Mac is pointing to a Norwegian Mac site called Mac1, which claims that Apple has bought all of the shares of Polar Rose, a facial recognition company based out of Sweden. The news is unconfirmed, at this point. 9to5Mac provides this Google Tranlsated excerpt:
The Malmö-based company specializes in developing technology which makes facial recognition, not unlike what Apple already has and uses iPhoto for Mac OS X. Through sophisticated algorithms, manages the software of the Arctic Rose to recognize faces in images and the company offers three different products using this solution. Two of the (Face Cloud and FaceLib) them seem to be very interesting for Apple.
Earlier this month on its blog, Polar Rose wrote that it had closed its face-tagging service. The company wrote:
The service got quite a few users interested and this in turn led to interest by larger companies in licensing our technology. This meant refocusing and that left our free service out in the cold. Although we did try to keep it up to date, this became harder and harder over time, as our licensing business accelerated.
We are really sorry to see it and our users go, but at the end of the day we are a business and need to go where business takes us.
This acquisition rumor follows another from last week that Apple acquired IMSense. Neither of these have been confirmed so far.
