Image Segmentation for Human Skin Detection

Abstract

Human skin detection is the main task for various human–computer interaction applications. For this, several computer vision-based approaches have been developed in recent years. However, different events and features can interfere in the segmentation process, such as luminosity conditions, skin tones, complex backgrounds, and image capture equipment. In digital imaging, skin segmentation methods can overcome these challenges or at least part of them. However, the images analyzed follow an application-specific pattern. In this paper, we present an approach that uses a set of methods to segment skin and non-skin pixels in images from uncontrolled or unknown environments. Our main result is the ability to segment skin and non-skin pixels in digital images from a non-restrained capture environment. Thus, it overcomes several challenges, such as lighting conditions, compression, and scene complexity. By applying a segmented image examination approach, we determine the proportion of skin pixels present in the image by considering only the objects of interest (i.e., the people). In addition, this segmented analysis can generate independent information regarding each part of the human body. The proposed solution produces a dataset composed of a combination of other datasets present in the literature, which enables the construction of a heterogeneous set of images.