Accurate skin diagnosis through end-user applications is important for early detection and cure of severe skin diseases. However, the low quality of dermoscopic images hampers this mission, especially with the presence of hair on these kinds of images. This paper introduces DM-AHR, a novel, self-supervised conditional diffusion model designed specifically for the automatic generation of hairless dermoscopic images to improve the quality of skin diagnosis applications. The current research contributes in three significant ways to the field of dermatologic imaging. First, we develop a customized diffusion model that adeptly differentiates between hair and skin features. Second, we pioneer a novel self-supervised learning strategy that is specifically tailored to optimize performance for hairless imaging. Third, we introduce a new dataset, named DERMAHAIR (DERMatologic Automatic HAIR Removal Dataset), that is designed to advance and benchmark research in this specialized domain. These contributions significantly enhance the clarity of dermoscopic images, improving the accuracy of skin diagnosis procedures. We elaborate on the architecture of DM-AHR and demonstrate its effective performance in removing hair while preserving critical details of skin lesions. Our results show an enhancement in the accuracy of skin lesion analysis when compared to existing techniques. Given its robust performance, DM-AHR holds considerable promise for broader application in medical image enhancement.
Keywords: automatic skin hair removal; diffusion models; healthcare image enhancement; healthcare image generation; melanoma detection; self-supervised techniques; skin diagnosis consumer applications; skin medical images.