Self-adaptive algorithm for segmenting skin regions

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new self-adaptive algorithm for segmenting human skin regions in color images. Skin detection and segmentation is an active research topic, and many solutions have been proposed so far, especially concerning skin tone modeling in various color spaces. Such models are used for pixel-based classification, but its accuracy is limited due to high variance and low specificity of human skin color. In many works, skin model adaptation and spatial analysis were reported to improve the final segmentation outcome; however, little attention has been paid so far to the possibilities of combining these two improvement directions. Our contribution lies in learning a local skin color model on the fly, which is subsequently applied to the image to determine the seeds for the spatial analysis. Furthermore, we also take advantage of textural features for computing local propagation costs that are used in the distance transform. The results of an extensive experimental study confirmed that the new method is highly competitive, especially for extracting the hand regions in color images.