Automated Facial Wrinkle Segmentation Scheme Using UNet++

Facial wrinkles are widely used to evaluate skin condition or aging for various fields such as skin diagnosis, plastic surgery consultations, and cosmetic recommendations. In order to effectively process facial wrinkles in facial image analysis, accurate wrinkle segmentation is required to identify wrinkled regions. Existing deep learning-based methods have difficulty segmenting fine wrinkles due to insufficient wrinkle data and the imbalance between wrinkle and non-wrinkle data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new facial wrinkle segmentation method based on a UNet++ model. Specifically, we construct a new facial wrinkle dataset by manually annotating fine wrinkles across the entire face. We then extract only the skin region from the facial image using a facial landmark point extractor. Lastly, we train the UNet++ model using both dice loss and focal loss to alleviate the class imbalance problem. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct comprehensive experiments using our facial wrinkle dataset. The experimental results showed that the proposed method was superior to the latest wrinkle segmentation method by 9.77%p and 10.04%p in IoU and F1 score, respectively.