Illumination invariant skin color segmentation

Skin color segmentation takes a great attention in many vision-based methodologies. However, the performance of the segmentation is not stable because of color variations caused by various illumination conditions. In this paper, we propose a new skin color model for segmentation which is invariant to illumination variation. It is based on illumination-free color space which is defined on Lambertian surface. Through several experimental results, we confirm that the proposed skin color model is successfully applied to skin color segmentation under various illumination conditions.