CSIRO’s Biotech Imaging team has developed imaging technology to measure the hair on different parts of the human body. Imaging technology is a math-based to count the hair. CSIRO’s Biotech Imaging team, specialize in developing software to analyze images automatically, worked with a personal care products in UK company to find a way to objectively test how well their hair removal products work in the area. Hair counting is done manually by the human assessors.

Dr. Pascal Valloton, Leader of Biotech Imaging at CSIRO said “Our software uses images captured by a small flatbed scanner pressed onto the skin. The software crunches the numbers to analyze the image of skin and hairs”. As the result, it reports information about the length and number of hairs in the picture. You can compare the results with previous and earlier images to see if hair is growing quickly or slowly or even has been properly removed by.

Linear Feature is the language of image analysis. There are lots of detecting linear features but this kind of software uses algorithms that exploit some special things about hairs such as straightness.

Dr Vallotton said The software can even detect hairs. Hairs that people find hard to see and event it’s not confused by variations of skin color or texture background.

The software uses are similar to those developed by the team for medical research to measure the branch of structure of nerve cells and to find the boundaries of fat cells.