Performance of Human Skin Detection in Images According to Color Spaces

Skin region detection in images is an important process in many computer vision applications targeting humans such as hand gesture recognition and face identification. It usually starts at a pixel-level, and involves a pre-process of color spae transformation followed by a classification process. A color space transformation is assumed to increase separability between skin classes and other classes, to increase similarity among different skin tones, and to bring a robust performance under varying imaging conditions, without any complicated analysis. In this paper, we examine if the color space transformation actually brings those benefits to the problem of skin region detection on a set of human hand images with different postures, backgrounds, people, and illuminations. Our experimental results indicate that color space transfomation affects the skin detection performance. Although the performance depends on camera and surround conditions, normalized [R, G, B] color space may be a good choice in general.