Exemplar-based freckle retouching and skin tone adjustment

This paper presents a novel system for freckle retouching and skin tone adjustment based on a set of exemplar image pairs obtained before and after cosmetic laser therapy. Our key observation is that cosmetic laser therapy relies on decomposing and adjusting melanin and hemoglobin to change skin appearance, and the reflectance properties of the two pigments can greatly influence human skin color. We thus retouch freckles and adjust skin tone in a query image by changing the densities of melanin and hemoglobin to match the variation of those in the exemplar image pairs. Based on the proposed system, we can easily and intuitively generate an output image that looks similar to the results of cosmetic laser therapy. Our system also can detect more skin flaws and define their regions more accurately than previous retouching methods. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.