arXiv:2609.31326v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Ordinal acne severity grading requires distinguishing visually similar neighboring grades while jointly weighing holistic facial appearance and localized lesion burden – evidence that most existing approaches collapse into a single opaque representation. We introduce CG-HAF, a global-local fusion framework that instead keeps this evidence explicit: averaged holistic severity probabilities from independently trained classifiers are combined with structured lesion-burden descriptors from an object detector (lesion count, detection confidence, lesion area) into a compact representation, from which a lightweight, interpretable classifier produces the final grade. On a widely used benchmark, this fusion yields a clear, statistically supported improvement over global-evidence-only baselines, with the largest gains on the most severe cases. Testing on an independent dataset with a different grading standard shows that strong within-dataset performance does not transfer automatically, and a follow-up diagnostic attributes much of this gap to mismatched grading criteria rather than detection failure alone. These findings support interpretable global-local fusion as an effective strategy for ordinal acne grading while highlighting criterion alignment as key to cross-dataset portability, with a further illustration of how the resulting severity signal can support transparent, non-diagnostic decision-making in skincare applications.
Abstract: Ordinal acne severity grading requires distinguishing visually similar neighboring grades while jointly weighing holistic facial appearance and localized lesion burden – evidence that most existing approaches collapse into a single opaque representation. We introduce CG-HAF, a global-local fusion framework that instead keeps this evidence explicit: averaged holistic severity probabilities from independently trained classifiers are combined with structured lesion-burden descriptors from an object detector (lesion count, detection confidence, lesion area) into a compact representation, from which a lightweight, interpretable classifier produces the final grade. On a widely used benchmark, this fusion yields a clear, statistically supported improvement over global-evidence-only baselines, with the largest gains on the most severe cases. Testing on an independent dataset with a different grading standard shows that strong within-dataset performance does not transfer automatically, and a follow-up diagnostic attributes much of this gap to mismatched grading criteria rather than detection failure alone. These findings support interpretable global-local fusion as an effective strategy for ordinal acne grading while highlighting criterion alignment as key to cross-dataset portability, with a further illustration of how the resulting severity signal can support transparent, non-diagnostic decision-making in skincare applications.
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