The Sweden-based Polar Rose is a new a new search engine that will use automatic facial recognition combined with 3D modeling to search photos online. On Tuesday, Polar Rose announced it has received initial funding of $5.1 million from Nordic Venture Partners in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Polar Rose’s technology aims to revolutionize how people sort and find photos of friends, celebrities or family on the Internet, regardless of whether the photos are in an individual web album or anywhere on the Internet, said Danish economist and serial tech entrepreneur Nikolaj Nyholm, Polar Rose’s CEO.

Collective intelligence is a key part of the Polar Rose technology. It will be used to improve search for photos and search algorithms, according to the company’s founder and CEO and Chief Technology Officer, Jan Erik Solem.

The site is still under development currently, but the open beta trial will available in Q1 2007. The company’s name, ‘Polar Rose’, is the name of a flower-shaped mathematical curve.

There has been speculation about Google’s ‘image recognition’ plans ever since they bought biometric company Neven Vision, and since they leaked the Google Vision concept search gadget . Google also recently unveiled the Google Image Labeler, which uses collective intelligence from users to effectively and accurately label images.

Another visual search engine, Riya, makes tagging easy and uses recognition technology to identify people or objects.

Via Red Herring