Skin Capacitive Image Stitching and Occlusion Measurements

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper investigates skin capacitive image stitching and occlusion measurements. In my opinion, the paper is a lot far away from possible consideration for publication before major revision. Comments are listed as follows:

 

(1)A large number of references published for more than 10 years are not enough to show the novelty of the author's research.

(2) The epsilon permittivity imaging system in Figure 1 is not clear.

(3) The author does not compare the proposed skin capacitive image stitching technique with the reported image stitching technique in many papers. Therefore, the advantage of the proposed skin capacitive image stitching technique can hardly be identified.

(4) SSIM has been reported in a large number of papers, but the SSIM proposed by the author has no novelty.

(5) The pictures in Fig.6, Fig.7 and Fig.8 are not clear, and there are no legends in the figures.

(6) “Linear (Righthand)” and “Linear (Leftthand)” in Fig.10 can't be distinguished.

(7) There is no uniform format for the references.

Author Response

We have updated the manuscript according to the reviewer's comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript presents a research on skin capacitive image stitching and occlusion measurements.

Authors claim that they were the first to present the theoretical background and experimental results.

I find the topic interesting and being worth of investigation and the document is well structured. 

Although I propose the following comments/suggestions:

- Abstract should be better organized: problem, motivation, aim, methodology, main results, further impact of those results.

- Keywords should be in alphabetical order

- I strongly suggest authors from refraining using personal pronouns such as "we" and "our" throughout the text and I encourage them to write it in an impersonal form of writing.

- It lacks a comparison with a gold standard to evaluate the obtained results

- Some important references are missing:

Bevilacqua, A., & Gherardi, A. (2008). Characterization of a capacitive imaging system for skin surface analysis. In 2008 First Workshops on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (pp. 1-7). IEEE.

Gherardi, A., & Bevilacqua, A. (2009). A capacitive image analysis system to characterize the skin surface. International Journal of Modern Physics C, 20(12), 2027-2041.

Pan, W. (2017). Skin Image Processing and Skin Characterizations (Doctoral dissertation, London South Bank University).

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript according to reviewer's comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have presented an interesting novel technique for skin capacitive imaging using an image stitching technique. The technique provided in this manuscript would be a very useful tool for the skin imaging process and skin-related research.

Here are some of my suggestions for this article:

1. Please proofread the manuscript for typing and grammatical errors.

2. Line 81. How do you justify that at least 30% overlaps between two adjacent images would be sufficient?

3. Line 97. Please mention what program is this code intended for.

4. Line 110. Please clarify this sentence. "..by using epsilon for 60 a period of seconds.."

5. Line 115. Please specify how the TEWL measurement was done by the AquaFlux instrument.

6. Line 133. Please specify how the occlusion measurement was done.

7. Line 137. The age range of the subjects was very small. How do you justify that the results would be valid for all age classes?

8. Line 155. Please rename the image (upper image and lower image) to 5A and 5B or other appropriate numbers.

9. Line 155. Please mention the program used to achieve these images and also the image scale.

10. Line 160. You mentioned the images were getting brighter. Were all the images taken with the same light setting?

11. Line 156. Did you perform any controls in the occlusion measurements?

12. Figure 6, 7, 8, 11. Please mention the image scale.

13. Line 181. Please mention the correlation method used.

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript according to reviewer's comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I have no questions with this muanusript.

Reviewer 2 Report

I am happy with the authors responses and the manuscript was adequately addressed and improved, support its acceptance for publication.