A system and method for classifying follicular units based on the number
of hairs in a follicular unit of interest comprises acquiring an image of
a body surface having a follicular unit of interest, processing the image
to calculate a contour of the follicular unit and an outline profile
which disregards concavities in the contour, and determining the number
of defects in the outline profile to determine the number of hairs in the
follicular unit. The system and method may also adjust for hairs which
converge beneath the skin and for images which appear as a single wide
hair but which are actually multiple hairs. In another aspect, a system
and method for determining the end points of a follicular unit comprises
generating a skeleton of a segmented image and identifying the end points
from the skeletonized image.