Want to know what celebrity you look like or find a potential date who has green eyes, dark hair and the perfect nose? A new facial recognition technology called Eyealike from Bellevue's ActiveSymbols is attempting to do just that. (I apparently resemble Vince Vaughn, Cary Elwes, Jeff Bridges and others.)

While president Greg Heuss said Eyealike could transform the online dating business -- allowing people to find mates by the geometry of one's face, hair color or skin tone -- he admits that the concept does rub some the wrong way. But Heuss said online dating sites are intrigued with facial search as an extension to personality questionnaires and other matching techniques.

"They want to use this to add on or enhance those, so when you are looking for the physical side .... you can start with an image, because everybody is basing their search on images anyway within the sites," he said. "I know it does sound kind of weird. But that is the way it is, fortunately or unfortunately out there."

Heuss calls the online dating industry the "low hanging fruit" and a "great showcase" of what Eyealike can do, but he said the facial recognition technology has applications ranging from homeland security to online video copyright protection to online photography (potentially automatically tagging photos by faces that appear in images.)

At this time, ActiveSymbols has not struck any licensing deals with online dating sites. But Heuss -- who previously worked in executive roles at Seattle online dating startups Kiss.com and PerfectMatch.com -- believes there's interest in the industry to move beyond text-based search.

"If you are typing in: 'I am looking for a blond hair, blue-eyed guy who lives in Seattle,' for example. Why not enhance that search by actually allowing those users to upload a photo of somebody they know or somebody off the Internet and start matching and playing around with search results based upon what that image is?" says Heuss. "So if it is blond hair or if you like this set of eyes, or whatever it is.... Again, as trivial as it may sound to actually base a search on that, for these dating companies this is their bread and butter."

Several startups already focus on image search, but only a handful are attacking the facial recognition element. One of the best known and most heavily funded was San Mateo, Calif.-based Riya, though it switched gears last year and started to focus on a shopping service called Like.com. While Eyealike could be used in online retailing product searches as well, Heuss said that is not at the top of his list and he sees bigger opportunity in the online dating arena.

"We are going at it in a completely different direction than the way (Riya) tackled it," said Heuss. "I think there is plenty of the market to go around. And, frankly, I think we have a better product and stronger team to push it through."

Now, the closest competitor to ActiveSymbols is probably Polar Rose, a Sweden-based facial recognition startup that raised $5.1 million last year. Heuss says Polar Rose has a solid product, though leans more toward the security market.

ActiveSymbols, which spun out of Logicalis earlier this year and has raised nearly $1.5 million in angel financing, has filed half a dozen patents on the technology.

Heuss, who doesn't plan to make money from a consumer offering at this time, admits that the celebrity matcher is a bit of a gimmick to get people engaged with the service and show off the face-recognition capability. Eyealike currently boasts more than 4,000 celebrities, with images pulled from the Internet Movie Database and other sources. (I experienced several problems attempting to load an image of proper size into the celebrity matcher, with Heuss saying they have been working out some bugs.)

The six-person company also has scraped more than 250,000 images from online dating services to use in its database, with Heuss saying that he believes they are permitted to do so since they are not storing the data. Eventually, he hopes to license the technology to online dating sites and social networking sites, noting that the "technology can be pretty beneficial to those guys."