• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.48 no.4
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• pp.21-29
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• 2011

At existing skin detection methods using skin color information defined based on the prior knowldege, threshold value to be used at the stage of dividing the backround and the skin region was decided on a subjective point of view through experiments. Also, threshold value was selected in a passive manner according to their background and illumination environments in these existing methods. These existing methods displayed a drawback in that their performance was fully influenced by the threshold value estimated through repetitive experiments. To overcome the drawback of existing methods, this paper propose a skin region detection method using a histogram approximation based on the mean shift algorithm. The proposed method is to divide the background region and the skin region by using the mean shift method at the histogram of the skin-map of the input image generated by the comparison of the similarity with the standard skin color at the CbCr color space and actively finding the maximum value converged by brightness level. Since the histogram has a form of discontinuous function accumulated according to the brightness value of the pixel, it gets approximated as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) using the Bezier Curve method. Thus, the proposed method detects the skin region by using the mean shift method and actively finding the maximum value which eventually becomes the dividing point, not by using the manually selected threshold value unlike other existing methods. This method detects the skin region high performance effectively through experiments.