You never know where a Stanford doctorate in electrical engineering can take you. For Parham Aarabi it has led to the the hair-style simulation web site HairMixer.com.
Aarabi’s company, Modiface, has created the HairMixer site that lets people try out celebrity hair styles on their own faces. It was his decade of research in computer vision and image processing that powered this application.
I used this application, as you can tell from the photo. It’s a site where you submit your own photo and within seconds can see how you would look with a celebrity’s hair-do. In this case, I tried out Jessica Simpson. About 15 million people are trying it out every month and mailing the results to their friends. And about 200,000 people have signed up for a version of HairMixer on Facebook since it launched in December.
“It’s been a very surprising direction,” said Aarabi, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Toronto. “I started it on a sabbatical. The growth has been surprising.”
After spending all that time researching algorithms that could lead to automatic face detection and analysis, Aarabi started Toronto-based Modiface with Alireza Rabi in 2006. Since then, the nine-person company has created a bunch of web applications that morph facial features. And it has partnered with a variety of companies that are using it to amuse and educate millions of consumers on the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
