A Comparative Study of Skin-Color Models

In this paper, we report the results of a comparative study on skin-color models generally used for facial region location. These include two 2D Gaussian models developed in normalized RGB and HSV color spaces respectively, a 1D lookup table model of hue histogram, and an adaptive 3D threshold box model. Also, we present a new model called “adaptive hue lookup table”. The model is developed by introducing the so-called “Continuously Adaptive Mean Shift” (Camshift) technique into a traditional hue lookup table method. With the introduction of Camshift, the lookup table is able to adaptively adjust its parameters to fit the illumination conditions of different test images. In the experiments reported here, we compare the proposed method with the four typical skin-color filters in the scenarios of different human races and illuminations. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method reaches the best balance between false detection and detect rate.