The Appearance of Human Skin: A Survey
Foundations and Trends® in
Computer Graphics and Vision
Volume 3 Issue 1
DOI: 10.1561/0600000013
The Appearance of Human Skin: A Survey
Takanori Igarashi
Skin Care Research Laboratory, Kao Corporation, Tokyo, Japan, igarashi.takanori@kao.co.jp
Ko Nishino
Department of Computer Science, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, kon@cs.drexel.edu
Shree K. Nayar
Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY, nayar@cs.columbia.edu
SUGGESTED CITATION:
Takanori Igarashi, Ko Nishino and Shree K. Nayar (2007)
"The Appearance of Human Skin: A Survey",
Foundations and Trends® in
Computer Graphics and Vision: Vol. 3: No 1, pp 1-95.
http:/dx.doi.org/10.1561/0600000013
Abstract
Skin is the outer-most tissue of the human body. As a result, people are very aware of, and very sensitive to, the appearance
of their skin. Consequently, skin appearance has been a subject of great interest in various fields of science and technology.
In particular, research on skin appearance has been intensely pursued in the fields of computer graphics, computer vision,
cosmetology, and medicine. In this survey, we review the most prominent results related to skin in these fields and show how
these seemingly disconnected studies are related to one another. In each of the fields, the optical behaviors of specific
skin components have been studied from the viewpoint of the specific objectives of the field. However, the different components
of skin produce different types of optical phenomena that are determined by their physio-anatomical characteristics (sizes,
shapes, and functions of the components). The final appearance of skin has contributions from complex optical interactions
of many different skin components with light. In order to view these interactions in a unified manner, we describe and categorize
past works based on the physiological and anatomical characteristics of the various skin components.