Integrative labeling based statistical color models with application to skin detection

To alleviate the workload of labeling before estimating certain color distributions, integrative labeling is introduced, which merely needs to figure out whether a picture contains positive-class regions or not and then all pixels of the picture are treated as positive or negative class training samples. Integrative labeling, however, results in heavy mixture of training samples. Thus traditional generative density estimation methods can't be used directly in that they perform poorly with heavily polluted training samples. In this paper, by utilizing the prior knowledge of high separability between positive and negative class color distributions, a discriminative learning based GMM(DiscGMM) is proposed for integrative labeling. Besides generating the polluted positive-class samples with comparatively high probability, optimal parameters found by DiscGMM also enjoy a comparatively low probability of generating negative-class samples. The parameter learning problem is solved by a modified Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. In an integrative labeling experiment of skin detection, DiscGMM is testified to enjoy much better performance than generative density estimation methods and shows qualified results.