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Systematic skin segmentation: merging spatial and non-spatial data

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Abstract

Skin detection is used in applications ranging from face detection, tracking of body parts, hand gesture analysis, to retrieval and blocking objectionable content. We present a systematic approach for robust skin segmentation using graph cuts. The skin segmentation process starts by exploiting the local skin information of detected faces. The detected faces are used as foreground seeds for calculating the foreground weights of the graph. If local skin information is not available, we opt for the universal seed. To increase the robustness, the decision tree based classifier is used to augment the universal seed weights when no local information is available in the image. With this setup, we achieve robust skin segmentation, outperforming off-line trained classifiers. The setup also provides a generic skin detection system, using positive training data only. With face detection, we take advantage of the contextual information present in the scene. With the weight augmentation, we provide a setup for merging spatial and non-spatial data. Experiments on two datasets with annotated pixel-level ground truth show that the systematic skin segmentation approach outperforms other approaches and provides robust skin detection.

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  1. http://www.feeval.org

  2. http://www.adobe.com

  3. http://viper-toolkit.sourceforge.net/

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sarhad University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan

    Rehanullah Khan

  2. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, TU-Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Allan Hanbury & F. Ali Khan

  3. Institute of Computer Aided Automation, TU-Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Robert Sablatnig

  4. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Julian Stöttinger

  5. Institute of Management Sciences, Peshawar, Pakistan

    F. Ali Khan

  6. COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan

    F. Alam Khan

Authors
  1. Rehanullah Khan
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  2. Allan Hanbury
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  3. Robert Sablatnig
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  4. Julian Stöttinger
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  5. F. Ali Khan
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  6. F. Alam Khan
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Correspondence to Rehanullah Khan.

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Khan, R., Hanbury, A., Sablatnig, R. et al. Systematic skin segmentation: merging spatial and non-spatial data. Multimed Tools Appl 69, 717–741 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-012-1124-y

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