A Person and Context Specific Approach for Skin Color Classification

Skin color is an important feature of faces. Various applications benefit from robust skin color detection. Depending on camera settings, illumination, shadows, people's tans, and ethnic groups skin color looks differently, which is a challenging aspect for detecting it automatically. In this paper, we present an approach that uses a high level vision module to detect an image specific skin color model. This model is then used to adapt parametric skin color classifiers to the processed image. This approach is capable to distinguish skin color from extremely similar colors, such as lip color or eyebrow color. Its high speed and high accuracy make it appropriate for real time applications such as face tracking and recognition of facial expressions

[1]  James Ze Wang,et al.  System for screening objectionable images , 1998, Comput. Commun..

[2]  Simon Baker,et al.  Setting Low-Level Vision Parameters CMU-RI-TR-0420 , 2004 .

[3]  Michael Beetz,et al.  Sensor-based Situated, Individualized, and Personalized Interaction in Smart Environments , 2005, GI Jahrestagung.

[4]  Matthias Wimmer,et al.  Experiences with an Emotional Sales Agent , 2004, ADS.

[5]  Vladimir Vezhnevets,et al.  A Survey on Pixel-Based Skin Color Detection Techniques , 2003 .

[6]  Paul A. Viola,et al.  Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2001.

[7]  Mika Laaksonen,et al.  Skin detection in video under changing illumination conditions , 2000, Proceedings 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition. ICPR-2000.

[8]  Stan Sclaroff,et al.  Skin color-based video segmentation under time-varying illumination , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.