SpringerLink
Log in

Skin Detection and Segmentation in Color Images

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Advances in Low-Level Color Image Processing

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computational Vision and Biomechanics ((LNCVB,volume 11))

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of existing methods for human skin detection and segmentation. First of all, the skin color modeling schemes are outlined, and their limitations are discussed based on the presented experimental study. Then, we explain the techniques which were reported helpful in improving the efficacy of color-based classification, namely (1) textural features extraction, (2) model adaptation schemes, and (3) spatial analysis of the skin blobs. The chapter presents meaningful qualitative and quantitative results obtained during our study, which demonstrate the benefits of exploiting particular techniques for improving the skin detection outcome.

An erratum to this chapter is available at 10.1007/978-94-007-7584-8_14

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Abdullah-Al-Wadud M, Chae O (2007) Region-of-interest selection for skin detection based applications. In: International conference on convergence information technology, pp 1999–2004

    Google Scholar 

  2. Abdullah-Al-Wadud M, Chae O (2008) Skin segmentation using color distance map and water-flow property. In: Proceedings of the information assurance and security (ISIAS ’08), pp 83–88

    Google Scholar 

  3. Abin AA, Fotouhi M, Kasaei S (2009) A new dynamic cellular learning automata-based skin detector. Multimedia Syst 15(5):309–323

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Al-Mohair HK, Mohamad-Saleh J, Suandi SA (2012) Human skin color detection: a review on neural network perspective. Int J Innovative Comput Inf Control (IJICIC) 8(12):8115–8131

    Google Scholar 

  5. Albiol A, Torres L, Delp E (2001) Optimum color spaces for skin detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on image processing, pp 122–124

    Google Scholar 

  6. Argyros AA, Lourakis MIA (2004) Real-time tracking of multiple skin-colored objects with a possibly moving camera. In: Proceedings of the ECCV, LNCS, vol 3023. Springer, pp 368–379

    Google Scholar 

  7. Baltzakis H, Pateraki M, Trahanias P (2012) Visual tracking of hands, faces and facial features of multiple persons. Mach Vis Appl 23:1141–1157

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Berbar MA (2011) Novel colors correction approaches for natural scenes and skin detection techniques. Int J Video Image Process Netw Secur 11(2):1–10

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bhoyar KK, Kakde OG (2010) Skin color detection model using neural networks and its performance evaluation. J Comput Sci 6(9):963–968

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Bilal S, Akmeliawati R, Salami MJE Shafie AA (2012) Dynamic approach for real-time skin detection. J Real-Time Image Process

    Google Scholar 

  11. Brand J, Mason J (2000) A comparative assessment of three approaches to pixel-level human skin-detection. In: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on pattern recognition vol 1, pp 1056–1059

    Google Scholar 

  12. Caetano TS, Olabarriaga SD, Barone DAC (2003) Do mixture models in chromaticity space improve skin detection? Pattern Recogn 36:3019–3021

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Cheddad A, Condell J, Curran K, Mc Kevitt P (2009) A skin tone detection algorithm for an adaptive approach to steganography. Signal Process 89(12):2465–2478

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  14. Chen MJ, Chi MC, Hsu CT, Chen JW (2003) ROI video coding based on H.263+ with robust skin-color detection technique. In: IEEE international conference on consumer electronics, pp 44–45

    Google Scholar 

  15. Chen YH, Hu KT, Ruan SJ (2012) Statistical skin color detection method without color transformation for real-time surveillance systems. Eng Appl Artif Intell 25(7):1331–1337

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Chenaoua K, Bouridane A (2006) Skin detection using a Markov random field and a new color space. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on image processing, pp 2673–2676

    Google Scholar 

  17. Choi B, Chung B, Ryou J (2009) Adult image detection using Bayesian decision rule weighted by SVM probability. In: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on computer sciences and convergence information technology (ICCIT ’09), pp 659–662

    Google Scholar 

  18. Clausi D, Jernigan M (1998) A fast method to determine co-occurrence texture features. IEEE Trans Geosci Remote Sensing 36(1):298–300

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Conci A, Nunes E, Pantrigo JJ, Sánchez Á (2008) Comparing color and texture-based algorithms for human skin detection. In: Proceedings of the ICEIS, pp 166–173

    Google Scholar 

  20. Cortes C, Vapnik V (1995) Support-vector networks. Mach Learn 20(3):273–297

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  21. Dadgostar F, Sarrafzadeh A (2006) An adaptive real-time skin detector based on hue thresholding: a comparison on two motion tracking methods. Pattern Recogn Lett 27(12):1342–1352

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Dawod A, Abdullah J, Alam M (2010) Adaptive skin color model for hand segmentation. In: Proceedings of the international conference on computer applications and industrial electronics (ICCAIE), pp 486–489

    Google Scholar 

  23. Duan L, Lin Z, Miao J, Qiao Y (2009) A method of human skin region detection based on PCNN. In: Proceedings of the international symposium on neural networks: advances in neural networks, ISNN, Part III, LNCS, vol 5553. Springer, Berlin, pp 486–493

    Google Scholar 

  24. Finlayson G, Hordley S, HubeL P (2001) Color by correlation: a simple, unifying framework for color constancy. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 23(11):1209–1221

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Finlayson GD, Schiele B, Crowley JL (1998) Comprehensive colour image normalization. In: Proceedings of the european conference on computer vison (ECCV), vol 1, Freiburg, Germany, pp 475–490

    Google Scholar 

  26. Forsyth DA, Fleck MM (1999) Automatic detection of human nudes. Int J Comput Vis 32:63–77

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Fotouhi M, Rohban M, Kasaei S (2009) Skin detection using contourlet-based texture analysis. In: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on digital telecomm (ICDT’09), pp 59–64

    Google Scholar 

  28. Fritsch J, Lang S, Kleinehagenbrock M, Fink G, Sagerer G (2002) Improving adaptive skin color segmentation by incorporating results from face detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international workshop on robot and human interactive, communication, pp 337–343

    Google Scholar 

  29. Gasparini F, Corchs S, Schettini R (2005) Pixel based skin colour classification exploiting explicit skin cluster definition methods. In: Proceedings of the 10th congress of the international colour association, vol 1, pp 543–546

    Google Scholar 

  30. Gatta C, Rizzi A, Marini D (2000) Ace: an automatic color equalization algorithm. In: Proceedings of the first european conference on color in graphics image and vision (CGIV02)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Gomez G, Morales EF (2002) Automatic feature construction and a simple rule induction algorithm for skin detection. In: Proceedings of the ICML workshop on machine learning in computer vision, pp 31–38

    Google Scholar 

  32. Greenspan H, Goldberger J, Eshet I (2001) Mixture model for face-color modeling and segmentation. Pattern Recogn Lett 22:1525–1536

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  33. Han J, Awad G, Sutherland A, Wu H (2006) Automatic skin segmentation for gesture recognition combining region and support vector machine active learning. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition. IEEE Computer Society, Washington DC, USA, pp 237–242

    Google Scholar 

  34. Hanbury A (2003) A 3D-polar coordinate colour representation well adapted to image analysis. In: Proceedings of the Scandinavian conf on image analysis (SCIA). Springer, Berlin, pp 804–811

    Google Scholar 

  35. Hossain MF, Shamsi M, Alsharif MR, Zoroofi RA, Yamashit K (2012) Automatic facial skin detection using Gaussian mixture model under varying illumination. Int J Innovative Comput Inf Control 8(2):1135–1144

    Google Scholar 

  36. Hsu RL, Abdel-Mottaleb M, Jain A (2002) Face detection in color images. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 24(5):696–706

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Jagadesh BN, Rao K, Satyanarayana C, RajKumar GVS (2012) Skin colour segmentation using finite bivariate pearsonian type-IIb mixture model and k-means. Signal Image Process Int J 3(4):37–49

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Jiang Z, Yao M, Jiang W (2007) Skin detection using color, texture and space information. Proc Int Conf Fuzzy Syst Knowl Discov 3:366–370

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Jones M, Rehg J (1999) Statistical color models with application to skin detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), vol 1, pp 637–663

    Google Scholar 

  40. Jones M, Rehg J (2002) Statistical color models with application to skin detection. Int J Comput Vis 46:81–96

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  41. Kakumanu P, Makrogiannis S, Bourbakis NG (2007) A survey of skin-color modeling and detection methods. Pattern Recogn 40(3):1106–1122

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  42. Kakumanu P, Makrogiannis S, Bryll R, Panchanathan S, Bourbakis N (2004) Image chromatic adaptation using ANNs for skin color adaptation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on tools with artificial intelligence (ICTAI), pp 478–485

    Google Scholar 

  43. Kawulok M (2008) Dynamic skin detection in color images for sign language recognition. In: Proceedings of the ICISP, LNCS, vol 5099. Springer, pp 112–119

    Google Scholar 

  44. Kawulok M (2010) Energy-based blob analysis for improving precision of skin segmentation. Multimedia Tools Appl 49(3):463–481

    Article  Google Scholar 

  45. Kawulok M (2012) Texture analysis for skin probability maps refinement. In: Proceedings of the MCPR, LNCS, vol 7329. Springer, pp 75–84

    Google Scholar 

  46. Kawulok M (2013) Fast propagation-based skin regions segmentation in color images. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition, FG, pp 1–7

    Google Scholar 

  47. Kawulok M, Kawulok J, Smolka B (2012) Discriminative textural features for image and video colorization. IEICE Trans Inf Syst 95–D(7):1722–1730

    Article  Google Scholar 

  48. Kawulok M, Nalepa J (2012) Support vector machines training data selection using a genetic algorithm. In: Statistical techniques in pattern recognition, S+SSPR 2012, LNCS, vol 7626. Springer, pp 557–565

    Google Scholar 

  49. Kawulok M, Szymanek J (2012) Precise multi-level face detector for advanced analysis of facial images. IET Image Process 6(2):95–103

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  50. Khan R, Hanbury A, Sablatnig R, Stottinger J, Khan F, Khan F (2012) Systematic skin segmentation: merging spatial and non-spatial data. In: Multimedia tools and applications, pp 1–25

    Google Scholar 

  51. Khan R, Hanbury A, Stöttinger J (2010) Skin detection: a random forest approach. In: Proceedings of the 17th IEEE international image processing (ICIP) conference, pp 4613–4616

    Google Scholar 

  52. Khan R, Hanbury A, Stöttinger J, Bais A (2012) Color based skin classification. Pattern Recogn Lett 33(2):157–163

    Article  Google Scholar 

  53. Kovac J, Peer P, Solina F (2002) Eliminating the influence of non-standard illumination from images. Technical report

    Google Scholar 

  54. Kovac J, Peer P, Solina F (2003) Human skin color clustering for face detection. In: EUROCON 2003 computer as a tool, vol 2, pp 144–148

    Google Scholar 

  55. Krahenbuhl P, Koltun V (2011) Efficient inference in fully connected CRFs with Gaussian edge potentials. In: Proceedings of the neural information processing systems (NIPS)

    Google Scholar 

  56. Kruppa H, Bauer MA, Schiele B (2002) Skin patch detection in real-world images. In: Proceedings of the DAGM symposium on pattern recognition, LNCS, vol 2449. Springer, pp 109–117

    Google Scholar 

  57. Kukharev G, Nowosielski A (2004) Fast and efficient algorithm for face detection in colour images. Mach Graph Vis 13:377–399

    Google Scholar 

  58. Lam HK, Au O, Wong CW (2004) Automatic white balancing using standard deviation of RGB components. In: Proceedings of the international symposium on circuits and systems (ISCAS) vol 3, pp 921–924

    Google Scholar 

  59. Lee JS, Kuo YM, Chung PC, Chen EL (2007) Naked image detection based on adaptive and extensible skin color model. Pattern Recogn 40:2261–2270

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  60. Lichtenauer J, Reinders MJT, Hendriks EA (2007) A self-calibrating chrominance model applied to skin color detection. In: Proceedings of the VISAPP, vol 1, pp 115–120

    Google Scholar 

  61. Musicant DR, Feinberg A (2004) Active set support vector regression. IEEE Trans Neural Netw 15(2):268–275

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Ng P, Pun CM (2011) Skin color segmentation by texture feature extraction and k-mean clustering. In: Proceedings of the 2011 3rd international conference on computational intelligence, communication systems and networks (CICSyN), pp 213–218

    Google Scholar 

  63. Nikolaidis A, Pitas I (2000) Robust watermarking of facial images based on salient geometric pattern matching. IEEE Trans Multimedia 2(3):172–184

    Article  Google Scholar 

  64. Phung S, Bouzerdoum A, Chai D (2005) Skin segmentation using color pixel classification: analysis and comparison. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell 27(1):148–154

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. Phung SL, Bouzerdoum A, Chai D (2002) A novel skin color model in YCbCr color space and its application to human face detection. In: Proceedings of the international conference on image processing, vol 1, pp I-289–I-292

    Google Scholar 

  66. Phung SL, Chai D, Bouzerdoum A (2003) Adaptive skin segmentation in color images. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal proceedings, pp 353–356

    Google Scholar 

  67. Rao K, Jagadesh BN, Satyanarayana C (2012) Skin colour segmentation using finite bivariate pearsonian type-IVa mixture model. Comput Eng Intell Syst 3(5):45–56

    Google Scholar 

  68. Ratnasingam S, McGinnity T (2012) Chromaticity space for illuminant invariant recognition. IEEE Trans Image Process 21(8):3612–3623

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  69. Schmugge SJ, Jayaram S, Shin MC, Tsap LV (2007) Objective evaluation of approaches of skin detection using roc analysis. Comput Vis Image Underst 108(1–2):41–51

    Article  Google Scholar 

  70. Schohn G, Cohn D (2000) Less is more: active learning with support vector machines. In: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on machine learning, pp 839–846. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, USA

    Google Scholar 

  71. Seow MJ, Valaparla D, Asari V (2003) Neural network based skin color model for face detection. In: Proceedings of the applied imagery pattern recognition workshop, pp 141–145

    Google Scholar 

  72. Shin M, Chang K, Tsap L (2002) Does colorspace transformation make any difference on skin detection? In: Proceedings of the IEEE workshop on applications of computer vision (WACV), pp 275–279

    Google Scholar 

  73. Sigal L, Sclaroff S, Athitsos V (2003) Skin color-based video segmentation under time-varying illumination. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Machine Intell 26:862–877

    Article  Google Scholar 

  74. Sobottka K, Pitas I (1996) Face localization and facial feature extraction based on shape and color information. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on image processing (ICIP), vol 3, pp 483–486

    Google Scholar 

  75. del Solar JR, Verschae R (2004) Skin detection using neighborhood information. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition, pp 463–468

    Google Scholar 

  76. Solina F, Peer P, Batagelj B, Juvan S (2002) 15 seconds of fame: an interactive, computer-vision based art installation. In: Proceedings of the international conference on control, automation, robotics and vision (ICARCV), vol 1, pp 198–204

    Google Scholar 

  77. Soriano M, Martinkauppi B, Huovinen S, Laaksonen M (2000) Skin detection in video under changing illumination conditions. In: Proceedings of the international conference on pattern recognition (ICPR), vol 1, pp 839–842

    Google Scholar 

  78. Stern H, Efros B (2002) Adaptive color space switching for face tracking in multi-colored lighting environments. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition (FG 2002). IEEE Computer Society, Washington DC, USA, pp 249–254

    Google Scholar 

  79. Stoerring M, Andersen HJ, Granum E, Granum E (1999) Skin colour detection under changing lighting conditions. In: Proceedings of the 7th symposium on intelligent robotics systems, pp 187–195

    Google Scholar 

  80. Sun HM (2010) Skin detection for single images using dynamic skin color modeling. Pattern Recogn 43(4):1413–1420

    Article  Google Scholar 

  81. Tan WR, Chan CS, Yogarajah P, Condell J (2012) A fusion approach for efficient human skin detection. IEEE Trans Ind Inf 8(1):138–147

    Article  Google Scholar 

  82. Taqa A, Jalab H (2010) Increasing the reliability of skin detectors. Sci Res Essays 5(17):2480–2490

    Google Scholar 

  83. Terrillon J-C, David M, Akamatsu S (1998) Automatic detection of human faces in natural scene images by use of a skin color model and of invariant moments. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition, pp 112–117, Nara, Japan

    Google Scholar 

  84. Tomaz F, Candeias T, Shahbazkia H (2003) Improved automatic skin detection in color images. In: Proceedings of the 7th digital computing: techniques and applications, pp 419–427

    Google Scholar 

  85. Tsekeridou S, Pitas I (1998) Facial feature extraction in frontal views using biometric analogies. In: Proceedings of the EUSIPCO ’98, pp 315–318

    Google Scholar 

  86. Tu Y, Yi F, Chen G, Jiang S, Huang Z (2010) Skin color detection by illumination estimation and normalization in shadow regions. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on information and automation (ICIA), pp 1082–1085

    Google Scholar 

  87. Vezhnevets V, Sazonov V, Andreeva A (2003) A survey on pixel-based skin color detection techniques. In: IN Proceedings of the GRAPHICON-2003, pp 85–92

    Google Scholar 

  88. Viola P, Jones M (2004) Robust real-time face detection. Int J Comput Vis 57(2):137–154

    Article  Google Scholar 

  89. Wang X, Zhang X, Yao J (2011) Skin color detection under complex background. In: Proceedings of the international conference on mechatronic science, electric engineering and computer, pp 1985–1988

    Google Scholar 

  90. Yang G, Li H, Zhang L, Cao Y (2010) Research on a skin color detection algorithm based on self-adaptive skin color model. In: Proceedings of the international conference on communications and intelligence information security (ICCIIS), pp 266–270

    Google Scholar 

  91. Yang J, Fu Z, Tan T, Hu W (2004) Skin color detection using multiple cues. In: Proceedings of the international conference on image processing (ICPR), vol 1, pp 632–635

    Google Scholar 

  92. Yang MH, Ahuja N (1999) Gaussian mixture model for human skin color and its applications in image and video databases. In: ProcSPIE 99, CA, San Jose, pp 458–466

    Google Scholar 

  93. Yang U, Kang M, Toh KA, Sohn K (2010) An illumination invariant skin-color model for face detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on biometrics: theory applications and systems (BTAS), pp 1–6

    Google Scholar 

  94. Yogarajah P, Condell J, Curran K, Cheddad A, McKevitt P (2010) A dynamic threshold approach for skin segmentation in color images. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on image processing (ICIP), pp 2225–2228

    Google Scholar 

  95. Yogarajah P, Condell J, Curran K, McKevitt P, Cheddad A (2012) A dynamic threshold approach for skin segmentation in color images. Int J Biometrics 4(1):38–55

    Article  Google Scholar 

  96. Yong-jia Z, Shu-ling D, **ao X (2008) A Mumford-Shah level-set approach for skin segmentation using a new color space. In: Proceedings of the international conference on system simulation and scientific computing (ICSC), pp 307–310

    Google Scholar 

  97. Zafarifar B, Martiniere A, de With P (2010) Improved skin segmentation for TV image enhancement, using color and texture features. In: Proceedings of the international conference on consumer electronics (ICCE), pp 373–374

    Google Scholar 

  98. Zarit BD, Super BJ, Quek FKH (1999) Comparison of five color models in skin pixel classification. In: Proceedings of the international workshop on recognition, analysis, and tracking of faces and gestures in, real-time systems, pp 58–63

    Google Scholar 

  99. Zhang MJ, Gao W (2005) An adaptive skin color detection algorithm with confusing backgrounds elimination. In: Proceedings of the international conference on image processing (ICIP), vol 2, pp 390–393

    Google Scholar 

  100. Zhu Q, Cheng KT, Wu CT, Wu YL (2004) Adaptive learning of an accurate skin-color model. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on automatic face and gesture recognition (FG 2004). IEEE Computer Society, Washington DC, USA, pp 37–42

    Google Scholar 

  101. Zhu Q, Wu CT, Cheng KT, Wu YL (2004) An adaptive skin model and its application to objectionable image filtering. In: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on multimedia (MULTIMEDIA ’04). ACM, New York, USA, pp 56–63

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under research grant no. IP2011 023071 from the Science Budget 2012–2013 and the European Union from the European Social Fund (grant agreement number: UDA-POKL.04.01.01-00-106/09.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland

    Michal Kawulok, Jakub Nalepa & Jolanta Kawulok

Authors
  1. Michal Kawulok
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Jakub Nalepa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Jolanta Kawulok
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michal Kawulok .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science dept., Louisiana State University, Shreveport, Louisiana, USA

    M. Emre Celebi

  2. Automatic Control, Silesian University of Technology, Gliwice, Poland

    Bogdan Smolka

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Kawulok, M., Nalepa, J., Kawulok, J. (2014). Skin Detection and Segmentation in Color Images. In: Celebi, M., Smolka, B. (eds) Advances in Low-Level Color Image Processing. Lecture Notes in Computational Vision and Biomechanics, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7584-8_11

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7584-8_11

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-007-7583-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-7584-8

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation