Title: A dynamic threshold approach for skin tone detection in colour images

Authors: Pratheepan Yogarajah; Joan Condell; Kevin Curran; Paul McKevitt; Abbas Cheddad

Addresses: School of Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS), University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, BT48 7JL, UK. ' School of Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS), University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, BT48 7JL, UK. ' School of Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS), University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, BT48 7JL, UK. ' School of Computing and Intelligent Systems, Magee campus, University of Ulster, UK. ' Umeå Centre for Molecular Medicine (UCMM), Umeå Universitet, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel dynamic threshold approach to discriminate skin pixels and non-skin pixels in colour images. Fixed decision boundaries (or fixed threshold) classification approaches are successfully applied to detect human skin tone in colour images. These fixed thresholds mostly failed in two situations as they only search for a certain skin colour range: any non-skin object may be classified as skin if non-skin objects|s colour values belong to fixed threshold range; any true skin may be mistakenly classified as non-skin if the skin colour values do not belong to fixed threshold range. Therefore in this paper, instead of predefined fixed thresholds, novel online learned dynamic thresholds are used to overcome the above drawbacks. The experimental results show that our method is robust in overcoming these drawbacks.

Keywords: skin tone detection; dynamic threshold; colour images; biometrics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2012.044291

International Journal of Biometrics, 2012 Vol.4 No.1, pp.38 - 55

Received: 03 Apr 2010
Accepted: 08 Feb 2011
Published online: 29 Nov 2014 *

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