Image Segmentation for Skin Detection

Abstract

Human skin detection, which usually performed before image processing, is the method of discovering skin-colored pixels and regions that may be of human faces or limbs in videos or photos. Many computer vision approaches have been developed for skin detection. A skin detector usually transforms a given pixel into a suitable color space and then uses a skin classifier to mark the pixel as a skin or a non-skin pixel. A skin classifier explains the decision boundary of the class of a skin color in the color space based on skin-colored pixels. The purpose of this research is to build a skin detection system that will distinguish between skin and non-skin pixels in colored still pictures. This performed by introducing a metric that measures the distances of pixel colors to skin tones. Results showed that the YCbCr color space performed better skin pixel detection than regular Red Green Blue images due to its isolation of the overall energy of an image in the luminance band. The RGB color space poorly classified images with wooden backgrounds or objects. Then, a histogram-based image segmentation scheme utilized to distinguish between the skin and non-skin pixels. The need for a compact skin model representation should stimulate the development of parametric models of skin detection, which is a future research direction.