arXiv:2602.19055eess.IVcs.CV2026-02

解耦皮肤颜色因素,提升皮肤病图像诊断公平性。

Automated Disentangling Analysis of Skin Colour for Lesion Images

  • 用压缩式解耦学习皮肤颜色的结构化潜空间。
  • 可实现不同肤色下病灶的假想编辑与颜色迁移。
  • 适合关注医疗公平与模型鲁棒性的研究者。

应用于皮肤图像的机器学习模型在训练与部署时若皮肤颜色捕获差异(SCCI)较大,性能会下降。这种差异源于环境因素(如光照、相机设置)与内在因素(如肤色)的纠缠,而现有方法常将其简化为单一肤色标量,不够准确。为此,本文提出一种皮肤颜色解耦框架,基于无标签皮肤科图像,通过压缩式解耦学习结构化的可操控潜空间。为防止暗色特征信息泄露,引入随机且基本单调的去色映射;为抑制局部图案(如墨水标记、疤痕)在颜色调整中的意外偏移,进一步设计几何对齐后处理。上述组件共同支持真实反事实编辑,回答关键问题:‘该皮肤病变在不同肤色下会是什么样?’,并实现图像间直接颜色转移及沿物理有意义方向(如血流灌注、白平衡)的可控遍历,可用于教育可视化。实验表明,基于本框架的数据集级增强与颜色归一化可达到有竞争力的病灶分类性能。最终,本工作推动公平诊断,通过构建包含多样肤色与成像条件的训练数据集。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Machine-learning models applied to skin images often have degraded performance when the skin colour captured in images (SCCI) differs between training and deployment. These discrepancies arise from a combination of entangled environmental factors (e.g., illumination, camera settings) and intrinsic factors (e.g., skin tone) that cannot be accurately described by a single "skin tone" scalar -- a simplification commonly adopted by prior work. To mitigate such colour mismatches, we propose a skin-colour disentangling framework that adapts disentanglement-by-compression to learn a structured, manipulable latent space for SCCI from unlabelled dermatology images. To prevent information leakage that hinders proper learning of dark colour features, we introduce a randomized, mostly monotonic decolourization mapping. To suppress unintended colour shifts of localized patterns (e.g., ink marks, scars) during colour manipulation, we further propose a geometry-aligned post-processing step. Together, these components enable faithful counterfactual editing and answering an essential question: "What would this skin condition look like under a different SCCI?", as well as direct colour transfer between images and controlled traversal along physically meaningful directions (e.g., blood perfusion, camera white balance), enabling educational visualization of skin conditions under varying SCCI. We demonstrate that dataset-level augmentation and colour normalization based on our framework achieve competitive lesion classification performance. Ultimately, our work promotes equitable diagnosis through creating diverse training datasets that include different skin tones and image-capturing conditions.

皮肤图像解耦表示公平性医学影像

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