Studying skin ageing through wavelet-based analysis of capacitive images

The skin care retains a great importance for both aesthetics and health. Nowadays, many different approaches are known to quantify the skin health status by analyzing the skin appearance. However, most of these methods are still grounded on surface replicas, or on the use of devices that are not suitable for a routine approach. Also not all the methods are designed to achieve results in an automatic manner. The work presented here describes a method to extract an age-related feature from high resolution capacitive map of the human skin achieved by a portable device. Skin surface samples of 87 subjects have been analyzed in vivo and automatically through using wavelet decomposition. After that samples have been enhanced, we devised a feature, which correspond to the energy of the wavelet coefficients at the finest scale. Experiments prove that the feature we extracted is linearly related to skin ageing.