Monk Skin Tone Scale

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] Computer vision researchers initially adopted the Fitzpatrick scale as a metric to evaluate how well a given collection of photos of people sampled the global population.

[5]The primary intended application of the scale is in evaluating datasets for training computer vision models.