Developing a predictive model of human skin colouring

A model of colour formation within human skin has been developed to aid the characterisation of pigmented skin lesions from their digitized colour images. The model is based on the Kublenka–Munk theory of scattering and absorption within inhomogeneous materials and the physics pertaining to their colour properties. By considering the skin to be a layered construction of such materials, the stratum corneum, epidermis, papillary dermis and reticular dermis, and by exploiting the physics related to the optical interface between these layers, the model generates all possible colours occurring within normal human skin. In particular, the model predicts that all skin colours have to lie on a simple curved surface patch within a three-dimensional colour space bounded by two physiologically meaningful axes, one corresponding to the amount of melanin within the epidermis and the other to the amount of blood within the dermis. These predictions were verified by comparing the CIE LMS coordinates of a representative, cross-racial sample of fifty skin images with the LMS coordinates predicted by the model. The results show that, within the predicted error bounds, the coordinates for normal skin colours do indeed lie on the curved surface generated by the model. Several possible applications of this representation are outlined, including images representing the melanin and blood components separately, as well as the possibility of measuring the Breslow thickness of melanocytic invasion within malignant melanoma.