This paper presents a skin-grading system for door-to-door cosmetic sales. The technology is based upon the needs of a mobile sales team equipped with only a cell phone. Using this technology, a salesperson can take a photo (using the webcam on their cell phone) of a customer's skin. The photo is sent via the cell phone's e-mail capabilities to an analysis system. Once received, the photo is evaluated by a data mining system based upon an expert-system. The skin-grading information is then transmitted back to the salesperson (usually within minutes). The salesperson receives an e-mail when the results are completed with a link to the customer's personalized web page. This web page (accessed via the salesperson's cell phone) includes information on the customer's skin grade and recommendations for cosmetic products.
Using this system, the sales team does not need to have extraneous pieces of equipment or software; they can simply use the technology they already own, a cell phone. In addition, this system does not require the sales team to understand the grading process or the expert system.
The expert system is based on more than 10,000 images judged by humans. The results of this data were entered into the system to formulate the parameters and rules extracted by the data mining application.
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