If you build anything that reasons about skin, you almost certainly sort people onto the Fitzpatrick scale. A research team tried to do that automatically last year and scored 16.67% on a photograph of an arm.

The same team, on the same images, scored 65.67% on those arms when they expressed the answer on a different scale.

What the study found

A group at TU Munich built an algorithm that estimates skin tone from the Individual Typology Angle, computed from CIELAB colour values using DensePose and OpenFace. They mapped the same values onto two scales: Fitzpatrick, and the Monk Skin Tone scale Google published in 2022.

Same images, same pipeline, same colour measurement underneath.…