Multi-manifold-based skin classifier on feature space Voronoï regions for skin segmentation

Abstract

Skin segmentation is a crucial and a challenging step in many face and gesture recognition techniques and it has various applications in human computer interaction, objectionable content filtering, image retrieval and many more. In this article, we propose a novel skin segmentation method, which uses multi-manifold-based skin classification of feature space skin candidate Voronoï regions to achieve accurate skin segmentation. The state-of-the-art skin segmentation techniques reported in this article focus on discrimination between textural feature vectors belonging to skin and non-skin classes. In contrast, the proposed method focuses on discrimination between textural feature vectors belonging to skin and skin-like (non-skin) classes, which lead to higher skin classification accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a novel image segmentation technique based on spatial and feature space Dirichlet tessellation (also called a Voronoï diagram) to achieve feature space segmentation of skin candidate regions of an image. These feature space segments will then be classified using a multi-manifold-based skin classifier. The proposed skin segmentation method was evaluated on two benchmark skin segmentation data sets and its results were compared with four other state-of-the-art methods proposed for skin segmentation. The experimental results reported in this article confirm that the proposed method outperforms the existing skin segmentation approaches in terms of false alarm rates in the skin segmentation process. Also, the proposed method results in the lowest minimal detection error compared to the existing methods reported in this article.