A large-scale experiment was conducted to investigate facial image quality on mobile phones. There were 8 original facial images from 4 skin tone types, each included a male and a female image. Each image was captured at 6500K and they were rendered to have 5 CCT (correlated colour temperature) and 5 Duv (the shifts away from the Blackbody locus) levels via CAT02 chromatic adaptation transform to simulate the effect of the images captured under 25 different lighting conditions. Each image was assessed under 9 ambient lighting conditions( including one dark condition) by 90 observers from 3 ethnic groups (Caucasian, Chinese and South Asian), each 30 observers. Preferred facial skin tone ellipse was established by maximizing the correlation coefficient between the model predicted probability and the preference percentage from the visual results. Four types of preferred skin tones had small differences in hue angle and chroma, but concentrated into a small colour region, about [24.7, 46.1°] for Cab* and hab values respectively. All ethnic group preferred images taken under illuminants having high CCT (6500-8000 K). It was also found that the chroma of the preferred skin tones will slightly increase as the ambient lighting CCT decrease.
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.