Quantification of pigmentation in human skin images

In this paper, we propose and compare four different approaches for quantification of hemoglobin and melanin in skin color images. The first method is to extract erythema/melanin indices based on skin absorbance theories. The second method is based on independent component analysis (ICA) assuming that hemoglobin and melanin absorbance spectra are independent. The third method is based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) with multiplicative update algorithm. The fourth method is a Beer-Lambert law based model-fitting technique. Quantitative evaluation through graph-cut segmentation on melanoma indicates that model-fitting method outperforms the other three methods.