Preferred skin reproduction centres for different skin groups

Abstract

Producing preferred skin colours is vital for the digital images on mobile phone manufacturers. Previous studies investigated the skin colours only in chromatic plane excluding lightness. A psychophysical experiment was conducted to determine preferred skin colour centres for different skin colour types on mobile displays in a darkened room. Ten facial images were selected for the experiment to cover different skin colour types (Caucasian, Oriental, South Asian and African). A set of 49 predetermined colour centres uniformly sampled within the skin colour ellipsoid in CIELAB colour space was used to morph skin colours of test images. Thirty observers from each of the 3 ethnic groups (Caucasian, Oriental and South Asian) participated in the experiment. The preferred skin colour centre and region in the form of ellipsoid for each skin group were reported. It was found that the preferred colour centres from different skin colour types were very similar except their lightness as expected, and were also quite similar between the observers from different ethnic groups.