The Monk Skin Tone Scale is an open-source, 10-shade scale describing human skin color, developed by Ellis Monk in partnership with Google and released in 2023.[1] It is meant to replace the Fitzpatrick scale in fields such as computer vision research, after an IEEE study found the Fitzpatrick scale to be "poorly predictive of skin tone" and advised it "not be used as such in evaluations of computer vision applications."[2] In particular, the Fitzpatrick scale was found to under-represent darker shades of skin relative to the global human population.
The following table shows the 10 categories of the Monk Skin Tone Scale alongside the six categories of the Fitzpatrick scale, grouped into broad skin tone categories:[3]
| Skin tone group | Monk scale 10 levels
| Fitzpatrick scale 6 levels
| ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| levels | allocation | levels | allocation | |
| Light | 1–3 | 30% | I–II | 33% |
| Medium | 4–6 | 30% | III–IV | 33% |
| Dark | 7–10 | 40% | V–VI | 33% |
- ^ Monk, Ellis (2023-05-04). "The Monk Skin Tone Scale". SocArXiv. doi:10.31235/osf.io/pdf4c.
- ^ Howard, John J.; Sirotin, Yevgeniy B.; Tipton, Jerry L.; Vemury, Arun R. (2021-10-27). "Reliability and Validity of Image-Based and Self-Reported Skin Phenotype Metrics". IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science. 3 (4): 550–560. arXiv:2106.11240. doi:10.1109/TBIOM.2021.3123550. ISSN 2637-6407. S2CID 235490065.
- ^ Heldreth, Courtney M.; Monk, Ellis P.; Clark, Alan T.; Schumann, Candice; Eyee, Xango; Ricco, Susanna (31 March 2024). "Which Skin Tone Measures Are the Most Inclusive? An Investigation of Skin Tone Measures for Artificial Intelligence". ACM Journal on Responsible Computing. 1 (1): 1–21. doi:10.1145/3632120.