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Robust skin segmentation using color space switching

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Abstract

Skin detection is very popular and has vast applications among researchers in computer vision and human computer interaction. The skin-color changes beyond comparable limits with considerable change in the nature of the light source. Different properties are taken into account when the colors are represented in different color spaces. However, a unique color space has not been found yet to adjust the needs of all illumination changes that can occur to practically similar objects. Therefore a dynamic skin color model must be constructed for robust skin pixel detection, which can cope with natural changes in illumination. This paper purposes that skin detection in a digital color image can be significantly improved by employing automated color space switching. A system with three robust algorithms has been built based on different color spaces towards automatic skin classification in a 2D image. These algorithms are based on the statistical mean of value of the skin pixels in the image. We also take Bayesian approaches to discriminate between skin-alike and non-skin pixels to avoid noise. This work is tested on a set of images which was captured in varying light conditions from highly illuminated to almost dark.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science BITS, Pilani, RJ, India

    A. Gupta & A. Chaudhary

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO, USA

    A. Gupta & A. Chaudhary

Authors
  1. A. Gupta
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  2. A. Chaudhary
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Correspondence to A. Gupta.

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The article is published in the original.

Ankur Gupta did his bachelors of engineering in Computer Science from BITS Pilani and has worked with VeriSign in past. Currently he is with Tondo Imaging, Bengaluru. His research interests are in vision based robotics, light invariant color segmentations and steganography. He holds two US patents also.

Ankit Chaudhary is major in Computer Engineering and received his PhD in Computer Vision. Currently he is Assistant Professor at Dept. of Computer Science, Truman State University, USA. His current research interests are in Vision based applications, Intelligent Systems and Graph Algorithms. He has more than fifty publications, authored one book and also has been guest editor for CAEE, Elsevier. He is on the Editorial Board of several International Journals and serves as Program Chair/TPC in many Conferences. He is also reviewer for Journals including IEEE Transactions. In past, he has been associated with BITS Pilani, University of Iowa and also has been visiting faculty/researcher to many Universities. He has also worked with CITRIX R and D and AVAYA INC as System Programmer.

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Gupta, A., Chaudhary, A. Robust skin segmentation using color space switching. Pattern Recognit. Image Anal. 26, 61–68 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661815040033

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1054661815040033

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