Sponsored. Leading smartphone maker TECNO is a pioneer in ensuring phones capture diverse skin tones more accurately, and has just announced some exciting technological breakthroughs.
The company has advanced its Universal Tone technology with a scientifically upgraded multi-skin tone colour card now featuring 372 colour patches and enhancements to the Multi-Skin Tone Color Restoration Engine. These upgrades ensure more accurate and inclusive skin tone representation in mobile imaging across diverse ethnicities and scenarios.
The developments will be shown on the TECNO CAMON 40 Series of phones, which will be unveiled at the massive Mobile World Congress trade show (MWC) taking place in Barcelona at the beginning of March. Visitors can check out the new series at TECNO’s booth, located at Hall 6 Stand 6B11, Fira Gran Via.
Expanding the skin tone database
The upgraded Universal Tone multi-skin tone colour card is now an even more inclusive and comprehensive database that reflects a huge spectrum of global skin tones, catering for users in regions such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
This upgraded card not only increases the number of patches but also enhances the scientific and practical application of skin tone measurement and quantification, serving as an important calibration tool for Universal Tone algorithms.
By providing a robust and diverse dataset for the skin tone restoration algorithms, the upgraded Universal Tone is able to achieve greater accuracy in capturing and representing a wider spectrum of tones. TECNO will showcase two tailored versions of this enhanced color card at MWC 2025 – one highlighting darker skin tones and the other focusing more on lighter ones.
TECNO has also customised a new region-specific colour card for Saudi Arabia, featuring 186 Saudi skin tone patches, in collaboration with the University of Leeds (UK) and Dar Al-Hekma University (Saudi Arabia).
Starting with this regional color card, TECNO will enhance Universal Tone’s capability for local tuning through in-depth research on skin tones, local scenarios and lighting conditions, empowering algorithm optimisation for regional specificity and delivering superior performance tailored to local consumer needs.
Enhancing the Multi-Skin Tone Color Restoration Engine
As one of the important engines of Universal Tone, the Multi-Skin Tone Color Restoration engine has been enhanced with the refined CCM Skin Tone Calibration Algorithm and Spectrum-Based Automatic White Balance (AWB) Algorithm.
The CCM algorithm, trained using TECNO’s upgraded Multi-skin Tone Color Card, ensures precise colour calibration, while the AWB algorithm, developed with spectral prediction based on skin tones, effectively addresses colour shift challenges in monochromatic photo scenarios and improves exposure and white balance for diverse skin tones in the same frame.
‘Together, these advancements in the Multi-Skin Tone Color Restoration engine collectively achieve an overall improvement of over 50% in skin tone accuracy, ensuring natural, true-to-life portraits across various skin tones and lighting conditions,’ says TECNO.
Universal Tone also integrates an Intelligent Skin-Tone Grading Exposure Algorithm, ensuring graded tone enhancement and consistent brightness recovery. Working together, these enhancements significantly boost Universal Tone’s multi-skin tone restoration capabilities and delivers superior performance in challenging scenarios such as pure colour background and backlighting conditions.
Click here for more information on TECNO Universal Tone – you can also check out your own skin tone number here!
