A YOLOv8 Implementation for Automatic Skin Pigmentation Detection: A Deep Learning Approach in Biomedical Image Analysis
Received: 12 February 2026 | Revised: 23 March 2026 and 12 April 2026 | Accepted: 17 April 2026 | Online: 6 June 2026
Corresponding author: Indriyani
Abstract
Skin pigmentation disorders such as melasma and Post-Inflammatory Hyperpigmentation (PIH) require objective assessment tools due to the subjectivity of clinical visual inspection. This study proposes a hybrid deep learning system that integrates YOLOv8 for real-time lesion detection and a fine-tuned Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for quantitative severity classification, further validated by automated software quality assurance. Unlike previous works focusing on cancerous lesions, this study targets non-cancerous pigmentation and provides a complete, deployable pipeline. Using the HAM10000 dataset (9,988 dermoscopic images), the YOLOv8 detector achieved a high localization accuracy (mAP@0.5: 0.92, IoU: 0.85) with a low-latency speed of 125–168 ms per image. The CNN classifier (MobileNetV2) achieved a training accuracy of 75% and a weighted average precision of 0.60 on the validation set, with a precision of 0.70 on the Severe class. The system was deployed as a FastAPI web service, and its reliability was confirmed through automated end-to-end testing with Katalon Studio, passing all API and UI test cases. The results demonstrate that the hybrid model provides an objective tool for automated skin pigmentation screening, capable of assisting clinicians in treatment planning and monitoring. The key novelty lies in combining detection, quantitative severity grading, and rigorous software validation into a single, clinically-oriented system.
Keywords:
skin pigmentation, YOLOv8, CNN classification, dermatology, Katalon Studio, deep learningReferences
A. M. Thawabteh, A. Jibreen, D. Karaman, A. Thawabteh, and R. Karaman, "Skin Pigmentation Types, Causes and Treatment—A Review," Molecules, vol. 28, no. 12, June 2023, Art. no. 4839.
D. Haykal, H. Cartier, and B. Dréno, "Dermatological Health in the Light of Skin Microbiome Evolution," Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, vol. 23, no. 12, pp. 3836–3846, Dec. 2024.
A. Honigman and M. Rodrigues, "Differential diagnosis of melasma and hyperpigmentation," Dermatological Reviews, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 30–37, Feb. 2023.
Z. Wang et al., "Quantitative classification of melasma with photoacoustic microscopy: a pilot study," Journal of Biomedical Optics, vol. 29, no. S1, Nov. 2023.
S. N. Almuayqil, S. A. El-Ghany, and M. Elmogy, "Computer-Aided Diagnosis for Early Signs of Skin Diseases Using Multi Types Feature Fusion Based on a Hybrid Deep Learning Model," Electronics, vol. 11, no. 23, Dec. 2022.
M. Pirahandeh, "Dermatological Health: A High-Performance, Embedded, and Distributed System for Real-Time Facial Skin Problem Detection," Electronics, vol. 14, no. 7, Mar. 2025, Art. no. 1319.
N. Gessert et al., "Skin Lesion Classification Using CNNs With Patch-Based Attention and Diagnosis-Guided Loss Weighting," IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 495–503, Oct. 2020.
A. Esteva et al., "Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks," Nature, vol. 542, no. 7639, pp. 115–118, Feb. 2017.
Z. Li, F. Liu, W. Yang, S. Peng, and J. Zhou, "A Survey of Convolutional Neural Networks: Analysis, Applications, and Prospects," IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, vol. 33, no. 12, pp. 6999–7019, Dec. 2022.
J. Redmon, S. Divvala, R. Girshick, and A. Farhadi, "You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection," in 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2016, pp. 779–788.
J. Terven, D. M. Córdova-Esparza, and J. A. Romero-González, "A Comprehensive Review of YOLO Architectures in Computer Vision: From YOLOv1 to YOLOv8 and YOLO-NAS," Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 1680–1716, Nov. 2023.
S. Gül, G. Cetinel, B. M. Aydin, D. Akgün, and R. Öztaş Kara, "YOLOSAMIC: A Hybrid Approach to Skin Cancer Segmentation with the Segment Anything Model and YOLOv8," Diagnostics, vol. 15, no. 4, Feb. 2025, Art. no. 479.
U. Saha, I. U. Ahamed, M. A. Imran, I. U. Ahamed, A. A. Hossain, and U. D. Gupta, "YOLOv8-Based Deep Learning Approach for Real-Time Skin Lesion Classification Using the HAM10000 Dataset," in 2024 IEEE International Conference on E-health Networking, Application & Services (HealthCom), Nov. 2024, pp. 1–4.
T. Xu, Y. Xiang, J. Du, and H. Zhang, "Cross-Scale Attention and Multi-Layer Feature Fusion YOLOv8 for Skin Disease Target Detection in Medical Images," Journal of Computer Technology and Software, vol. 4, no. 2, Mar. 2025.
S. Albahli, "A Robust YOLOv8-Based Framework for Real-Time Melanoma Detection and Segmentation with Multi-Dataset Training," Diagnostics, vol. 15, no. 6, Mar. 2025, Art. no. 691.
D. Sutaji and O. Yildiz, "YOLOv8’s head-layer Performance Comparison for Skin Cancer Detection," Proceeding of International Conference of Advanced Transportation, Engineering, and Applied Social Science, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1036–1042, 2023.
Q. Zhou, Z. Wang, Y. Zhong, F. Zhong, and L. Wang, "Efficient Optimized YOLOv8 Model with Extended Vision," Sensors, vol. 24, no. 20, Oct. 2024.
R. Sapkota et al., "YOLO advances to its genesis: a decadal and comprehensive review of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) series," Artificial Intelligence Review, vol. 58, no. 9, June 2025, Art. no. 274.
V. Afifah and S. Erniwati, "YOLOv8 for Object Detection: A Comprehensive Review of Advances,Techniques, and Applications," IJACI : International Journal of Advanced Computing and Informatics, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 53–61, July 2025.
W. Salma and A. S. Eltrass, "Automated deep learning approach for classification of malignant melanoma and benign skin lesions," Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 81, no. 22, pp. 32643–32660, Sept. 2022.
M. Sandler, A. Howard, M. Zhu, A. Zhmoginov, and L. C. Chen, "MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks," in 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2018, pp. 4510–4520.
T. Y. Lin, P. Goyal, R. Girshick, K. He, and P. Dollár, "Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 318–327, Oct. 2020.
R. P. Octavially, R. R. Riskiana, K. A. Laksitowening, D. S. Kusumo, M. Adrian, and N. Selviandro, "Test Case Analysis with Keyword-Driven Testing Approach on Angkasa Website Using Katalon Studio Tools," Ultimatics: Jurnal Teknik Informatika, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 134–141, 2021.
P. Tschandl, C. Rosendahl, and H. Kittler, "The HAM10000 dataset, a large collection of multi-source dermatoscopic images of common pigmented skin lesions," Scientific Data, vol. 5, no. 1, Aug. 2018, Art. no. 180161.
H. L. Nguyen, D. T. Le, and H. H. Hoang, "Application of Synthetic Data on Object Detection Tasks," Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 15695–15699, Aug. 2024.
Downloads
How to Cite
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Indriyani, Paula Dewanti, Yupiter HP Manurung

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) after its publication in ETASR with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
