Texture-adaptive skin detection for TV and its real-time implementation on DSP and FPGA

This paper presents a skin detection algorithm for TV applications, and investigates the feasibility of its real-time implementation on a DSP and an FPGA platform. We present the details of the algorithm, which combines a flexible histogram-based color feature, and a color-constrained texture feature suitable for skin detection. First we show the improvement in detection result, as compared to existing color-only detectors. Then we explore three implementations: (1) full-precision non real-time SW on DSP, (2) reduced-precision real-time SW on DSP, and (3) full-precision realtime hardware on FPGA. We conclude that even though a real-time SW implementation is possible, its quality is sub-optimal and the solution is too expensive for a practical consumer TV system. Therefore, hardware support is indispensable for full-precision realtime execution of the proposed algorithm on HD video.