A new article published in Scientific Reports discussed that skin pigmentation is associated with skin damages and skin cancers and ultraviolet (UV) photography is used as a minimally invasive mean for the assessment of pigmentation. Since UV photography equipment is not usually available in general practice, technologies emphasizing pigmentation in color photo images are desired for daily care.

The authors proposed a new method using conditional generative adversarial networks – UV-photo Net, to generate synthetic UV images from color photo images. Evaluations using color and UV photo image pairs taken by a UV photography system demonstrated that pigment spots were well reproduced in synthetic UV images by UV-photo Net, and some of the reproduced pigment spots were difficult to be recognized in color photo images.

In the pigment spot detection analysis, the rate of pigment spot areas in cheek regions for synthetic UV images was highly correlated with the rate for UV photo images – Pearsons correlation coefficient 0.92. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that UV-photo Net was effective for floating up pigment spots for photo images taken by a smartphone camera.

Thus, UV-photo Net enables an easy assessment of pigmentation from color photo images and will promote self-care of skin damages and early signs of skin cancers for preventive medicine.

Source: Scientific Reports. 2021 Jan 13;11(1):1213. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-79995-4.