Detection of Skin Pigmentation using Independent Component Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for detecting and measuring human skin pigmentation. In the proposed scheme, we extract a skin area by a Gaussian skin color model that is estimated from the statistical analysis of training images and remove tiny noises through the morphology processing. A skin area is decomposed into two components of hemoglobin and melanin by an independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm. Then, we calculate the intensities of hemoglobin and melanin by using the location histogram and determine the existence of skin pigmentation according to the global and local distribution of two intensities. Furthermore, we measure the area and density of the detected skin pigmentation. Experimental results verified that our scheme can both detect the skin pigmentation and measure the quantity of that and also our scheme takes less time because of the location histogram.