Hair and bare skin discrimination for laser-assisted hair removal systems

Laser-assisted hair removal devices aim to remove body hair permanently. In most cases, these devices irradiate the whole area of the skin with a homogenous power density. Thus, a significant portion of the skin, where hair is not present, is burnt unnecessarily causing health risks. Therefore, methods that can distinguish hair regions automatically would be very helpful avoiding these unnecessary applications of laser. This study proposes a new system of algorithms to detect hair regions with the help of a digital camera. Unlike previous limited number of studies, our methods are very fast allowing for real-time application. Proposed methods are based on certain features derived from histograms of hair and skin regions. We compare our algorithm with competing methods in terms of localization performance and computation time and show that a much faster real-time accurate localization of hair regions is possible with the proposed method. Our results show that the algorithm we have developed is extremely fast (around 45 milliseconds) allowing for real-time application with high accuracy hair localization ( 96.48 %).