Hair occlusion is one of the main challenges facing automatic lesion segmentation and feature extraction for skin cancer applications. Since hair shafts are very thin with spatially-varying width, validating disocclusion algorithms based on manual preparation of ground truth masks (with accurate hair-width for a large number of hair pixels) would be exorbitantly tedious (let alone for a large number of images).

To accurately and comprehensively validate the goodness of detecting hair shafts with varying thickness, we have developed a hair simulation algorithm. Given a hair-free dermoscopic image, HairSim provides you a hair-occluded image accompanied with its binary hair-mask.