Human Skin Region Segmentation Based on Chrominance Component Using Modified Watershed Algorithm

Abstract

A novel watershed segmentation algorithm has been proposed to segment the human skin region of RGB color images based on Cb component of YCbCr color space in this paper. The conventional watershed segmentation algorithm is not suitable for segmentation of human skin region from color images directly, since it is difficult to decide suitable color information of human skin. At first stage, the RGB image is converted into YCbCr color space which contains three components luminance, blue difference component (Cb) and red-difference component (Cr). The Cb component has been extracted and used for further processing steps. After extraction of Cb component, the modified marker based watershed algorithm has been applied for segmentation of human skin region only from RGB color image. The proposed method has been tested on FRI CVL Face Database. In experimental stage, results show that the proposed technique avoids over segmentation problem and produce good segmentation result which is comparable with the same obtained by other algorithms.