A Survey on Pixel-Based Skin Color Detection Techniques

Abstract

Skin color has proven to be a useful and robust cue for face detection, localization and tracking. Image content filtering, content-aware video compression and image color balancing applications can also benefit from automatic detection of skin in images. Numerous techniques for skin color modelling and recognition have been proposed during several past years. A few papers comparing different approaches have been published [Zarit et al. 1999], [Terrillon et al. 2000], [Brand and Mason 2000]. However, a comprehensive survey on the topic is still missing. We try to fill this vacuum by reviewing most widely used methods and techniques and collecting their numerical evaluation results.