A Cellular Telephone-Based Application for Skin-Grading to Support Cosmetic Sales.
Hironori Hiraishi, Fumio Mizoguchi · 2003
We have developed a sales support system for door-to-door sales of cosmetics based on a skin-image grad-ing system called Skin-CRM (Skin Customer Relation-ship Management). Our Skin-CRM analyzes the current grade (quality) of a customer’s skin from a picture of his/her skin. Several parameters are extracted by image processing, and the skin-grading is done by rules gener-ated by data mining from a base-line of grades given by human skin-care experts. Communication with our Skin-CRM is through a cel-lular phone with a camera, using e-mail software and a web browser. This type of a cellular phone is quite popular in Japan. Thus our system does not require any special hardware. Sales people take a picture of cus-tomer’s skin using the camera in their phone, with a small cheap magnifier to get the right scale. Then the picture is sent to our analysis system by e-mail to which is attached the picture. The picture is analyzed by our skin-grading system. The results are output as a page in html format available on a customer accessible web-site. An e-mail is sent when the results are available, usually within minutes. Sales people check the result by using a web browser on their cellular phone. The output not only provides a grading result, but also recommen-dations for care and cosmetics that are most suitable for this customer. Our system integrates web technology, computer anal-ysis, data mining and an expert system. Though sales people use only a cellular phone with very little comput-ing power as the front-end, they can take advantage of intelligent services such as computer grading and data mining. The sales people do not need think about what is running in the background.