Patent ID: 8401300

Claim:
A method of digitally transforming a skin image, the method comprising the following steps in sequence: (a) acquiring a digital image of the skin, to obtain a first image; (b) extracting an individual skin attribute selected from the group consisting of blemishes, pores, fine lines and wrinkles from the digital image by linear digital filtering on all color channels, to obtain a contrast map in all three channels of the individual attribute; wherein the contrast map in constructed by one or both of the following filtering procedures; i) for blemishes and pores, making two copies, designated copy 1 and copy 2 of the first image for each of its three color channels; subjecting copy 1 to a fine 2D Gaussian filter operation of radius r and subjecting copy 2 to a coarse 2D Gaussian filter operation of radius R to make two filtered images 1a and 2a respectively; subtracting image1a from the Image 2 a for each of the corresponding color channels to make the contrast map for blemishes and pores; ii) for fine lines and wrinkles, making two copies of the first image for each of its three color channels, designated image 1 and image 2; subjecting image 1 to a fine 1D Gaussian filter operation at 4 discreet angles to make Images 1-0°, 1-45°, 1-90° and 1-135°; subjecting Image 2 for each of its three color channels to a coarse 1D Gaussian filter operation at the same discreet angles used in the fine 1D Gaussian filter operation so as to make Images 2-0°, 2-45°, 2-90° and 2-135°; subtracting at each angle images 1- from Images 2- for each of the corresponding color channels and the discreet angles of 0°, 45°, 90° and 135° so as to make Images 3-0°, 3-45°, 3-90° and 3-135° respectively; averaging Images 3-0°, 3-45°, 3-90°, and 3-135° to obtain the contrast map for fine lines and wrinkles; and (c) transforming the first image by adding to the first image or subtracting from the first image a fraction of the contrast map, to obtain a second image with transformed individual skin attribute.