System and method for measuring hair diameter

1. A system for measuring the diameter of a human hair, the system comprising:

a mobile device; and

a reference card including a hair attachment mechanism;

the mobile device configured to convert an image of a human hair attached to the reference card by the attachment mechanism into a measurement of the diameter of the human hair, using the size of the reference card itself and/or the size of a calibration marker on a surface of the reference card as a size reference.

2. The system of claim 1 , wherein the mobile device comprises a digital imaging device for capturing the image of the human hair attached to the reference card.

3. The system of claim 1 , wherein the hair attachment mechanism takes the form of a first attachment point at one end of the card for receiving one end of the hair and a second attachment point at the opposite end of the card for receiving the other end of the hair.

4. The system of claim 3 , wherein one or more of the attachment points is a slit in the card.

5. The system of claim 1 wherein a surface of the reference card includes an adhesive region.

6. The system of claim 1 , wherein the reference card has a matt surface.

7. The system of claim 1 wherein to generate the diameter measurement, the mobile device is configured to:

record the digital image taken by the digital device in a memory of the mobile device;

process the recorded image using an segmentation algorithm to extract one or more calibration markers and/or the reference card boundary;

scale the captured image using the extracted calibration data to create a calibrated image with a known relation to actual physical dimensions; and

extract the diameter of the hair from the calibrated image.

8. The system of claim 7 wherein to generate the diameter measurement, the mobile device is further configured to rotate and/or crop the captured image such that the orientation and/or size of the calibrated image of the hair fibre is optimised for subsequent dimensional analysis.

9. The system of claim 1 , wherein the mobile device is configured to access a database comprising a list of hair products, each hair product assigned one or more ranges of hair diameters for which the product is suitable.

10. The system of claim 9 , wherein, once a hair diameter measurement has been made, the mobile device is configured to access the database and to generate an output of a recommended hair product for the user based on products in the database which are listed against the measured diameter.

11. The system of claim 1 , wherein the mobile device is configured to present the image taken by the digital imaging device to the user for quality verification before processing the image.

12. A method of measuring the diameter of a human hair, the method comprising the steps of:

obtaining an image of a human hair attached to a reference card, the reference card including one or more calibration markers; and

converting the image of the hair into a measurement of the diameter of the hair using the one or more calibration markers as a size reference.

13. A method of measuring the diameter of a human hair, the method comprising the steps of:

providing a reference card, the reference card including a hair attachment mechanism;

attaching a human hair to the reference card using the hair attachment mechanism;

obtaining an image of the human hair attached to the reference card, the reference card including one or more calibration markers; and

converting the image of the hair into a measurement of the diameter of the hair using the one or more calibration markers as a size reference.