{"id":61766,"date":"2015-09-22T12:11:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T04:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=61766"},"modified":"2016-05-31T09:57:48","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T13:57:48","slug":"big-beauty-brands-using-lip-reading-technology-developed-by-u-of-t-professor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2015\/09\/22\/big-beauty-brands-using-lip-reading-technology-developed-by-u-of-t-professor\/","title":{"rendered":"Big beauty brands using lip reading technology developed by U of T professor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"ModiFace<\/a>
ModiFace is now used by cosmetics companies from L\u2019Oreal to Unilever and Yves Rocher for different applications, such as adding different shades of lipstick to an image of a face uploaded by a user. (Screengrab from Modiface’s website<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

TORONTO \u2013 Canadian technology originally developed years ago to enhance speech recognition is now being used by some of the world’s biggest beauty brands.<\/p>\n

University of Toronto engineering professor Parham Aarabi designed lip-reading software more than a decade ago that initially garnered interest from the military community.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal was to read lips and combine that with audio to do better speech recognition,\u201d Aarabi said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea was that in certain environments \u2013 noisy environments or very far away from the person you\u2019re trying to listen to \u2013 audio doesn\u2019t work, so you have to use computer vision to read someone\u2019s lips to guess what they might be saying.\u201d<\/p>\n

The technology worked about half the time, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could eavesdrop on someone from very far away and based on the image zoomed in on their face guess as to what they were saying.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the algorithms he built to track contours of lips proved adept in the beauty industry.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when his company, ModiFace, was born. The company grew slowly since launching in 2007.<\/p>\n

Aarabi says the technology is now used by cosmetics companies from L\u2019Oreal to Unilever and Yves Rocher for different applications, such as adding different shades of lipstick to an image of a face uploaded by a user.<\/p>\n

About a year ago demand for ModiFace began to surge. At the time, he said, there were about 20 brands using the software.<\/p>\n

Now, he said, 52 brands have licensed his technology that appears in more than 200 apps, with a total of more than 60 million downloads.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what the catalyst was, but everyone is rushing to have augmented reality as part of their apps, websites and retail solutions,\u201d Aarabi said.<\/p>\n

He expects that total to double in the coming year.<\/p>\n

It turns out his lip-reading software solved a long-standing problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the biggest challenges in the beauty industry is that most people don\u2019t know what product is best for them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way the beauty industry has worked for a century is you\u2019re shown what a model looks like and because it looks good on a model \u2013 or because the skin care makes the model look perfect by some definition of perfection \u2013 therefore this product must be the right product for you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

“What we found is that if we can show the product in a very realistic and truthful way to the consumer on their own image… it is substantially more effective as a marketing and educational tool than if you show an image of a model.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the next year or two Aarabi says his technology will allow customers to walk into a store, glance at a mirror and have different shades of lipstick on their reflection looking back at them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TORONTO \u2013 Canadian technology originally developed years ago to enhance speech recognition is now being used by some of the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":61767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-61766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-original","mauthors-liam-casey","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}