A reliable human skin detection method that is adaptable to different human
skin colours and illu- mination conditions is essential for better human skin
segmentation. Even though different human skin colour detection solutions have
been successfully applied, they are prone to false skin detection and are not
able to cope with the variety of human skin colours across different ethnic.
Moreover, existing methods require high computational cost. In this paper, we
propose a novel human skin de- tection approach that combines a smoothed 2D
histogram and Gaussian model, for automatic human skin detection in colour
image(s). In our approach an eye detector is used to refine the skin model for
a specific person. The proposed approach reduces computational costs as no
training is required; and it improves the accuracy of skin detection despite
wide variation in ethnicity and illumination. To the best of our knowledge,
this is the first method to employ fusion strategy for this purpose.
Qualitative and quantitative results on three standard public datasets and a
comparison with state-of-the-art methods have shown the effectiveness and
robustness of the proposed approach.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 8(1),
pp. 138-147, new skin detection + ground truth (Pratheepan) datase