Skin tone reproduction based on multiple preferred skin colors

In a color image, people and especially facial patterns are important and interesting visual objects. Thus, effective skin color reproduction is essential, as skin color is a key memory color in color application systems. Previous studies suggested skin color reproduction by mapping only to the center value of preferred skin region. However, it is not suitable to determine one preference color because preference color from the observer's preference test is not dominant. In this paper, skin color reproduction using multiple preferred skin colors for each race is proposed. The proposed method first defines multiple preferred skin colors for each race according to their luminance level. The race is then selected by calculating distance between average chromaticity of detected region and that of each racial skin from a database to assign preferred skin color for each race. Next, each corresponding preferred skin color is determined for each selected race. Finally, input skin color is proportionally mapped toward preferred skin color according to the difference between the input skin color and the preferred skin color for a smoothly reproduced skin color.