A Cellular Telephone-Based Application for Skin-Grading to Support Cosmetic Sales

摘要

We have developed a sales support system for door-to-door sales of cosmetics based on a skin-image grading system called Skin-CRM (Skin Customer Relationship 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 generated by data mining from a base-line of grades given by human skin-care experts. Communication with our Skin-CRM is through a cellular 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 customer'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 website. 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 recommendations for care and cosmetics that are most suitable for this customer. Our system integrates web technology, computer analysis, data mining and an expert system. Though sales people use only a cellular phone with very little computing 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.