A Robust Method for Skin Detection and Segmentation of Human Face

Abstract

This paper presents the procedure of skin detection and segmentation which can find out arbitrarily tilted human faces in color images. Face segmentation is based on skin detection through the establishment of skin model. Firstly, a method for compensating the color of the input images is used to alleviate the interferences from bad illuminating conditions; secondly, a skin model about skin information is used to detect skin pixels in color images; thirdly, a new algorithm of segmentation integrated histogram with otsu is used to find out the skin regions in binary images; finally, mathematical morphology operator and prior knowledge are used to point out the face regions and discard regions that are similar to the skin in color. This method can handle various sizes of faces, different illumination conditions, diverse pose and changeable expression. In particular, the scheme significantly increases the execution speed of the face segmentation algorithm in the case of complex backgrounds.