1.4 Overview of Dierent Methods of Skin Detetion
1.4.1 Skin detetion methods using stati framework
1.4.1.1 Expliit boundary speiation
Boundary speiation forskin olourdepends ona set of thresholds and onditions whih
ould beeither dened in thesame olour spae,(e.g. RGB) orina transformed olourspae,
suh asYCbCr, HSV, CIELab et.
One of the earliestmethodsofskin detetionis proposed by Sobottkaand Pitas [43℄. They
proposed a skin detetion boundary along
S
andH
hannels in HSV olour spae asS ∈ [0.23, 0.68]
andH ∈ [0, 50]
. Later, Tsekeridou and Pitas proposed a modiation [2℄ to thismethodforfaeregionsegmentationinanimagewatermarkingsystem[72℄. Theorresponding
boundary rule in the HSV olour spae isas follows:
(0 ≤ H 6 25) ∨ (335 6 H 6 360) (0 6 S 6 0.6) ∧ (0.4 6 V )
(1.21)
Figure 1.6-a shows the projetion of the above rules onto the RGB olour spae. Here, darker
shade shadeimplieshigher density ofskinpixels. Solina etal.[3℄proposed anotherset of xed
Figure 1.6: Skin olour distributions in dierent olour planes: (a) Tsekeridou and Pitas [2℄, (b)
Solina etal.[3℄, ()Hsuetal. [4℄,(d)Kukharev andNowosielski [5℄,(e) A.Cheddad etal.[6℄,and (f)
Y.-H.Chen etal.[7℄. (Note: thegure istaken from [8℄)
rules in RGB spae for fae detetion of people havingfair omplexionas:
(R > 95) ∧ (G > 40) ∧ (B > 20) max(R, G, B) − min(R, G, B) > 15
|R − G| 6 15 ∧ (R > G) ∧ (R > B)
inuniform daylight illumination (1.22)
or,
(R > 220) ∧ (G > 210) ∧ (B > 170)
|R − G| 6 15 ∧ (R > G) ∧ (R > B)
in ashlight lateralillumination (1.23)
For unknown lightingonditions, a pixelis lassiedas skin if itsatises one of the above two
onditions. These rules are illustrated inFigure 1.6-b in R-G, R-B, G-B and r-g planes. Hsu
et al. [4℄proposed a boundary rule based on YCbCr olour spae. The authors observed that
the shape of skin tone luster in Cb-Cr spae an be approximated as an elliptial struture
wherethe lusterloationdepends onluminane
Y
. They performed anon-linearmodiationto
C b
andC r
values ifY < 125
orY > 188
. Subsequently, the skin pixel luster is modelled as an ellipse in a transformed spaeCb ′ Cr ′
. The equivalent results for skin distribution in RGB spae is shown in Figure 1.6-. Kukharev and Nowosielski proposed another set of skindetetion rules [5℄ using RGB and YCbCr olour spaes asfollows:
(R > G) ∧ (R > B)
{(G > B) ∧ (5R − 12G + 7B > 0)} ∨ {(G < B) ∧ (5R + 7G − 12B > 0)}
{Cr ∈ (135, 180)} ∧ {Cb ∈ (85, 135)} ∧ (Y > 80)
(1.24)
TheorrespondingmodelrepresentationinRGBandrgspaeisgiveninFigure1.6-d. Cheddad
et al. [6℄transformed the normalized RGB olour spae intoa single-dimensional error signal,
where the skin olour distribution an be modelled as a Gaussian urve [6℄. Subsequently,
a pixel is lassied as a skin if its 1D equivalent value lies within the two threshold values
determined by the standard deviation of the urve. The skin model is shown in Figure 1.6-e.
Reently,Chenetal. proposedanewRGBsubspae forskindetetionbysubtratingtheRGB
values:
sR = R − G
,sG = G − B
,sB = R − B
. Subsequently, they proposed aboundary rule{(−142 < sR < 18) ∧ (−48 < sG < 92) ∧ (−32 < sB < 192)}
. The rules are illustrated in Figure 1.6-f. In [73℄, Shaik et al. ompared HSVand YCbCr spaes for skindetetion using aTable 1.1: Mostpopular examplesof olour spaes usedin skindetetion: RGB, YCbCr, HSV and
advanedspaeER/GH [18℄
Colour
spae
Range of omponents Restritions for skin olour
RGB R,G,B: [0,255℄
R > 95 ∧ G > 40 ∧ B > 20 ∧
{max (R, G, B) − min (R, G, B) > 15} ∧ |R − G| >
15 ∧ R > G ∧ R > B
YCbCr Y, Cb,Cr: [0, 255℄
Y > 80 ∧ 77 < Cb < 127 ∧ 133 < Cr < 173
HSV H: [
0 ◦
,360 ◦
℄,S,V: [0,1℄0 ◦ < H < 50 ◦ ∧ 0.1 < S < 0.68 ∧ 0.35 < V < 1
ER/GH R,G: [0, 255℄, H:[
0 ◦
,360 ◦
℄13.4224 < E ∧ R/G < 1.7602 ∧ H < 23.89
boundary-based method. In 2015,Sawiki and Miziolek[18℄ proposed anotherset of boundary
rules in CMYK spae asfollows:
•
Before ROC analysis:(K < 205) ∧ (0 6 C 6 0.05) ∧ (0.089 < Y < 1) ∧ (0 6 C/Y < 1) ∧ (0.1 6 Y /M < 4.8)
(1.25)
•
After ROC analysis:(K < 205) ∧ (0 6 C 6 0.05) ∧ (0.0909 < Y < 0.945) ∧ (0.1 6 Y /M < 4.67)
(1.26)Apart from these simple boundary speiations in dierent olour spaes, advaned ap-
proahes are also proposed for a more aurate 3D desription of skin luster. For example,
Garia and Tziritas [74℄ proposed a skin detetion method by utilizing a set of planes in the
YCbCr spae. Brandand Mason [50℄ performed a omparativeanalysis of algorithmsin three
olour spaes: RGB, YES and YIQ. In their analysis, parametri thresholds and statistial
funtions are used. Thresholding of the
R/G
ratios is also performed. In [51℄, a new olourspae
ER/GH
is proposed by mixingof olour omponents. In the pseudospaeER/GH
,E
belongs to YES,the
R/G
ratio is fromRGB spae, andH
isfrom HSV.Some of the authors used additional information like texture features to improve skin de-
tetion. For example, Wang et al. [75℄ used gray-level o-ourrene matrix (GLCM) for skin
detetion. In this method,a whitebalaning is performed in YCbCr olourspae to minimize
the eet of unontrolled illuminationonditions. Firstly, the
Y
omponents are arranged indesending order. The minimum valueof thetop 5% values ofthe
Y
omponentistermedasaparameter
E
,and remainingvaluesinthetop 5%are setto255. Similarly,themaximumvalueamong the bottom 5% values of the
Y
omponentis termed asa parameterB
, and remainingvalues inthebottom5% are setto0. Finally,the intermediate
Y
omponentsare re-alulated as:g(x, y) = 255 × ln f(x, y) − ln B
ln E − ln B
(1.27)where,
g(x, y)
isthewhitebalanedluminanevalueatloation(x, y)
,andf (x, y)
istheoriginalluminane valuebeforewhite balaning. The skinolourmodelisdened by asetof boundary
rulesinRGBspae. TheauthorsalsofoundthatskindistributioninYCgCbspaetakesirular
shape. Finally, a skin mask is obtained by ANDing two skin models derived from RGB and
YCbCr spaes. Detetionperformane isfurther improved by inorporating atexture analysis
into this skin model. Textural features are extrated using the GLCM. For a given gray-sale
image
I
of sizen × m
, the GLCM is given by:T (i, j ) =
n
X
x=1 m
X
y=1
1, ifI(x, y) = i ∧ I(x + ∆ x , y + ∆ y ) = j 0, otherwise,
(1.28)
where,
(∆ x , ∆ y )
isthe oset between the pixelsI(x, y)
andI (x + ∆ x , y + ∆ y )
. The omputa-tional omplexity in determiningthe GLCM depends on the number of grey levels
g
,and itisproportionalto
O(g 2 )
However, reently published literatures show that the performane of expliit boundary
speiation-based methods are not better than the model-based approahes [8℄.