Robust estimation of pigment distributions from multiband skin images and its application to realistic skin image synthesis

Abstract

This paper describes a robust method for estimating pigment distributions on a skin surface from multiband images. The spatial distributions of the pigments such as melanin, oxy-hemoglobin and deoxy-hemoglobin give rise to a color texture. The distributions are estimated by using the Kubelka-Munk theory. The accuracy of estimating the pigment distributions is affected by a fine texture of sulcus cutis and a broad texture of shade caused by three-dimensional body shape. In order to separate these textures from the color texture, wavelet-based multi-resolution analysis (MRA) is applied to the multiband images before the pigment estimation, because the textures of sulcus cutis and shade predominantly have low and high spatial frequency components in the multiband skin images, respectively. Realistic skin image is synthesized from modified pigment distributions with additional features such as stain, inflammation and bruise by changing the concentrations of melanin, oxy-hemoglobin and deoxy-hemoglobin, respectively. The experimental results of skin image synthesis show good feasibility of the proposed method. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.