Associate Professor Parham Aarabi (ECE) has become a beauty maven with ModiFace, a $30 million virtual makeover business, where users try out cosmetics, wedding gowns and plastic surgery for free online.

Beauty is perhaps an unintuitive market for an engineer to pursue, but as he discovered, it’s not such a bad fit.

Associate Professor Aarabi, who is a Canada Research Chair in Internet Video, Audio and Image Search, was determined to make the ideal visualization tool: one that could take a 2D image and show a 3D effect, like a face lift or lip filler, in real-time. He researched for an intense eight months, meeting more than 100 surgeons.

Two years later, Botox and facial fillers Juvederm and Restylane were using ModiFace. The next year, Oxygen, a lifestyle channel, and Hearst signed on.

A ModiFace app generally works like this: users upload a photo and alter it by applying makeup or administering plastic surgery.

Sounds simple, but there are two technical challenges. The first is facial recognition. An app must be able detect an eye, for example, so makeup isn’t accidentally applied on an eyeball.

Associate Professor Aarabi and his engineers coded a “neural network,” a computer model that works like a simplified human brain, and trained it to identify facial features.

The second challenge is coding graphics that replicate the colour and texture of makeup — glossy, sparkly, matte or otherwise — onscreen. The codes behind facial recognition and colour graphics are the bulk of ModiFace’s patents.

To read the full article, visit the Toronto Star.