MERL/ETH Skin Reflectance Database

MERL/ETH Skin Reflectance Database

The MERL / ETH Skin Reflectance Database is a set of statistics for parameters of the Torrance-Sparrow and Blinn-Phong analytic BRDF models and face albedo. We derived these statistics from measuring skin reflectance of 149 subjects of varying age, gender, and race. We are making the collected statistics publicly available to the research community for applications in face synthesis and analysis.

For more details about the underlying skin model, the data collection, and the face database statistics, please see the following paper:

"Analysis of Human Faces Using a Measurement-Based Skin Reflectance Model"
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), ISSN:0730-0301, Vol. 25, Issue 3, pp. 1013-1024, July 2006 (ACM Press), Weyrich, T.; Matusik, W.; Pfister, H.; Bickel, B.; Donner, C; Tu, C.; McAndless, J.; Lee, J.; Ngan, A.; Jensen, H.W.; Gross, M

  If you use this data you are implicitly agreeing to our copyright notice. We would appreciate if you cite our paper in any publications that result from the use of this data.

Torrance-Sparrow BRDF Parameters

The free parameters of the physically-based Torrance-Sparrow BRDF model are the roughness m and the scaling coefficient rho_s.

Blinn-Phong BRDF Parameters

The free parameters of the Blinn-Phong BRDF model are the specular exponent n and the scaling coefficient rho_s.

Skin Albedo Histograms

The RGB components of the skin albedo are made available as histograms. As we show in the paper, these histograms can also be used to transfer face appearance.

The Skin Reflectance Database

Current database version: May 22, 2006, containing 156 faces.
The database contains Blinn-Phong, Torrance-Sparrow, and albedo coefficients from randomly sampled points in the different face regions shown in this figure:

We structured the data by skin type, age, and gender. We use the following Fitzpatrick skin type system:

Download the complete data for the Albedo, Torrance-Sparrow (151 MB), and Blinn-Phong (88 MB) statistics. The data is stored as a Matlab file.

Please select skin type, age, and gender for which you want to see a detailed analysis:   
Skin Type:     Age:    Gender:   
 













© Copyright 2006 Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) & Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH)
All Rights Reserved.

Permission to use, copy and modify this data and its documentation without fee for educational, research and non-profit purposes, is hereby granted.

To request permission to incorporate this data into commercial products contact: Vice President of Marketing and Business Development; Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 or license@merl.com.
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