A Picture Says Thousands of Words - Harnessing Dermal Exposure Data from Images through Hybrid Deep Learning for Enhanced Safety Assessment

This study developed a hybrid computer vision method to quantify exposed skin from images for dermal exposure assessment. Using 170 indoor-painting images, Mask R-CNN first identified human subjects and removed background interference; a color-based algorithm then segmented exposed skin. The resulting exposed-skin-to-body pixel ratios showed approximately 80% agreement with human estimates. The approach demonstrates a scalable way to extract semi-quantitative exposure information from images, with future extensions to body-part recognition, PPE detection, and video-based exposure analysis.