Patent ID: 8532354

Claim:
A method for providing visual simulation of teeth whitening executable by a machine and rendered on the display of the machine, comprising the steps of: a teeth detection process comprising the steps of: detecting, determining, recognizing, and locating one or more faces in a photo or image; taking a count of the faces to determine the total number of faces in the photo or image; determining, recognizing, and locating the teeth in an image; associating the teeth with a face in an image; selecting a face and associated teeth; and a whitening process comprising the steps of: extracting seed pixels from a small rectangle inside the teeth area that is used to identify the teeth colors; discarding any incorrect seed pixels, which are those that have very different colors when compared to the ones around it; determining the seed pixel count; building an initial whitening mask using the seed pixels; flagging which pixels should be whitened; creating an expanded mask to neighboring pixels with similar colors; combining the initial whitening mask and the expanded mask; and creating a whitened teeth image using the original image with the combined initial whitening mask and the expanded mask.