Hand image segmentation using color and RCE neural network

This paper presents a color segmentation method based on RCE neural network for hand image segmentation in the gesture-based human–service robot interaction system. The study on skin color distributions in different color spaces indicates that skin colors cluster in a small region in a color space. The RCE neural network characterizes the skin color distribution region using skin color prototypes together with their spherical influence fields during training stage, and identifies the skin regions in the color image during running stage. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of this method for the segmentation of various hand images as well as general color images with complex backgrounds. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.