Title: Honeycomb model based skin colour detector for face detection

Authors: Yu-Ting Pai, Li-Te Lee, Shanq-Jang Ruan, Yen-Hsiang Chen, Saraju P. Mohanty, Elias Kougianos

Addresses: Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan. ' Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan. ' Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan. ' Department of Electronic Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei 106, Taiwan. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5017, USA. ' Department of Engineering Technology, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203-5017, USA

Abstract: Skin colour is an important feature for face detection and recognition in colour images. To obtain the possible face regions in colour images, skin colour models are always constructed by statistical analysis. Owing to low accuracy of the static models, researchers have discussed several dynamic models to correct input images. Unfortunately, it is possible that some objects whose colour is the same as the definition exist, and the previous methods cannot separate real skin item from skin colour background. Thus, this paper presents a honeycomb model to recognise the real human skin colour. The performance of the new skin colour detector technique has been tested under complex lighting source and background environments. It is observed that the proposed model can effectively improve the segmentation results. Especially, the honeycomb model is capable of separating the human face which connected with other face or skin colour background.

Keywords: face detection; skin colour detection; illuminant colour; honeycomb models; face recognition; colour images; segmentation; nosie filters; pattern recognition.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2010.034736

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2010 Vol.39 No.1/2/3, pp.93 - 100

Published online: 18 Aug 2010 *

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