Honeycomb Model Based Skin Color Detector for Face Detection

Skin color is an important feature for face detection and recognition in color images. In order to obtain the possible face regions in color images, the skin color models are always constructed by statistical analysis. Owing to low accuracy of the static models, researches have discussed several dynamic models to correct input image such as illumination compensation, white balance, edge points addition, etc. Unfortunately, it is possible that some objects whose color is the same as the definition exist, and the previous methods can not separate real skin item from skin color background. Thus, to enhance skin color separation, this paper presents a honeycomb model to recognize the real human skin and the skin color items. First, the possible skin color is estimated from the pixels of database, and the honeycomb structure is built in HSV color space according to the training samples. Then, the personal skin is captured in one of the honeycomb cells. The performance of the new skin color detector technique has been tested under complex lighting source and background environments. It is observed that the proposed model can effectively improve the segmentation results. Especially, the honeycomb model is capable of separating the human face which connected with other face or skin color background.