Image-based control of skin translucency.

We propose a method for skin translucency control of facial images. This is one of the important tasks in the reproduction of posters, TV commercials, movies, and so on. As the first step of processing, we extract the component maps of melanin, hemoglobin, and shading from skin color images by using our conventional method. The extracted shading component is controlled to change the translucency of the skin by simple kernel operations for the component. The efficiency for the change of translucency is confirmed by using the images of numerical and optical skin phantoms. The method is also applied into the real skin color image with the consideration of each component, and realistic change of skin translucency was observed from the resultant images synthesized by the proposed method.