Improved analysis for skin color separation based on independent component analysis

Abstract

The conventional skin color separation method suffers from the severe limitation that the input skin image must have no shading component and must have substantial variation in the pigment density distribution, simultaneously. We therefore propose an improved method, which uses two input skin images instead of one. In this improved method, one input image has no shading component and the other has substantial variation in pigment density distribution. To verify the effect of our method, we took images of four subjects and separated them into pigment components. We then compared the independence evaluation value of the separated signals extracted using our method and that of the conventional method. The results show that we obtain separated signals that have a better independence evaluation value by our method than by the conventional method.