Skin Tone in the Wild: A Dataset and Benchmark for 10-tone MST Classification
Abstract
Skin tone classification is a fundamental task in computer vision, with applications in quantifying medical features, assessing demographic representativeness, and mitigating algorithmic bias. However, existing datasets either rely on a restrictive 6-tone Fitzpatrick scale, prohibit training through restrictive licenses, or lack representation of extreme skin tones, while current methods often fail to disentangle true skin tone from in-the-wild imaging conditions, degrading to random-classifier performance. We introduce skin tone in the wild (STW), the first open-access dataset annotated with the 10-tone Monk Skin Tone (MST) scale, containing over 42K images and specifically curated to include underrepresented tones. Alongside a rigorous evaluation protocol, we propose SkinToneNet, a ViT-based model that leverages global image context for robust in-the-wild generalization. Experiments show that SkinToneNet achieves 90% weighted off-by-one accuracy, substantially outperforming prior baselines. We further use SkinToneNet to audit widely used face datasets, including CelebA and VGGFace2, revealing substantial representation imbalances across MST tones.
