Apple Inc. has confirmed that it has acquired the facial recognition firm Polar Rose based in Malmo, Sweden.

Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet made the confirmation to Cnet.com but declined to say the reason behind the acquisition. She said it's a company policy not to comment on the purpose and plans for acquiring smaller technology companies.

The acquisition follows the shutting down of Polar Rose's free face-tagging service on Sept. 6. Thijs Stalenhoef, director of solutions for Polar Rose, said the service was stopped as larger companies wanted to license the technology. Stalenhoef said the technology will re-appear in the licensee's products in the future.

Apple Inc. already uses facial recognition technologies for its Aperture and iPhoto. Aperture is a photo editing and management software program for the Mac OS X operating system released in 2005.

iPhoto can import, organize, edit, print and share digital photos. It was released in 2002 bundled with every new Macintosh computer.

Polar Rose has three facial recognition technologies: FaceCloud, FaceLib and FaceCore. FaceCloud is a face recognition solution for web-service providers, social networks, carriers and other companies with photo repositories.

FaceLib is a mobile face recognition solution available for Android or iPhone. It offers full face detection, tracking of faces in video and on-device recognition.

FaceCore is a face detection and recognition technology for application developers so they can integrate face detection and recognition into their offerings whether it is on the server or desktop running on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.