Preferred Skin Color Enhancement of Digital Photographic Images

Reproducing skin colors pleasingly is essential for photographic color reproduction. Moving skin colors toward their preferred skin color center improves the skin color preference. Two main factors to successfully enhance skin colors are: a method to detect skin colors effectively and a method to morph skin colors toward a preferred skin color region properly. This paper starts with introducing a method to enhance skin colors using a static skin color detection model. It significantly improves the color preference for skin colors that are not far off from regular skin tones. To enhance a greater range of skin tones effectively, another method that automatically adapts the skin color detection model to the skin tone of each individual image is proposed. It not only enhances skin colors effectively, but also adjusts the overall image colors to produce more accurate white balance on the image.