Analyzing the effect of cosmetic essence by independent component analysis for skin color images

In development of cosmetic essence, measurement of melanin distribution is required to evaluate the effect of cosmetic essences. However, exact measurement of the melanin distribution is very difficult because it is affected by other pigmentations. In this paper, the decrease of melanin component is analyzed by extracting the melanin distribution from digital color images. The independent component analysis (ICA) is used to extract the melanin component from the color images. The ICA is a technique that extracts the original signals from mixtures of many independent sources without a priori information on the sources and the process of the mixture. This paper shows that proposed method is effective to observe the change of the melanin distribution without influence of other pigmentations.