• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.36 no.1
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• pp.54-61
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• 2009

This paper proposes a skin segmentation method based on region histograms of the color quantization map. First, we make a quantization map of the image using the JSEG algorithm and detect the skin pixel. For the skin region detection, the similar neighboring regions are set by its similarity of the size and location between the previous frame and the present frame from the each region of the color quantization map. Then we compare the similarity of histogram between the color distributions of each quantized region and the skin color model using the histogram distance. We select the skin region by the threshold value calculated automatically. The skin model is updated by the skin color information from the selected result. The proposed algorithm was compared with previous algorithms on the ECHO database and the continuous images captured under time varying illumination for adaptation test. Our approach shows better performance than previous approaches on skin color segmentation and adaptation to varying illumination.