# Evaluating the Efficacy of Skincare Product: A Realistic Short-Term Facial Pore Simulation

## TL;DR

This paper introduces the first realistic simulation model for facial pore changes after skincare product use, enabling better skin health management and product evaluation through a two-step pipeline involving data collection and pore deformation modeling.

## Contribution

The paper presents a novel simulation pipeline with a sliding window data cleaning method and a UNet-based pore segmentation, advancing facial skin simulation technology.

## Key findings

- Realistic rendering of facial pore changes achieved
- Effective data cleaning improves simulation accuracy
- Pipeline facilitates future skincare research and product testing

## Abstract

Simulating the effects of skincare products on face is a potential new way to communicate the efficacy of skincare products in skin diagnostics and product recommendations. Furthermore, such simulations enable one to anticipate his/her skin conditions and better manage skin health. However, there is a lack of effective simulations today. In this paper, we propose the first simulation model to reveal facial pore changes after using skincare products. Our simulation pipeline consists of 2 steps: training data establishment and facial pore simulation. To establish training data, we collect face images with various pore quality indexes from short-term (8-weeks) clinical studies. People often experience significant skin fluctuations (due to natural rhythms, external stressors, etc.,), which introduces large perturbations in clinical data. To address this problem, we propose a sliding window mechanism to clean data and select representative index(es) to represent facial pore changes. Facial pore simulation stage consists of 3 modules: UNet-based segmentation module to localize facial pores; regression module to predict time-dependent warping hyperparameters; and deformation module, taking warping hyperparameters and pore segmentation labels as inputs, to precisely deform pores accordingly. The proposed simulation is able to render realistic facial pore changes. And this work will pave the way for future research in facial skin simulation and skincare product developments.