Study on Extraction of Flesh-Colored Region

Abstract

Five color spaces, RGB, XYZ, YIQ, HSV and LUV color spaces, were examined to know which was the most suitable to extract a face region. From the observations of flesh-colored pixel distributions in those color spaces, a face region was most successfully extracted by an ellipse from the UV plane in the LUV color space. A proposed method using LUV color space and ellipse extraction was an extension of that proposed by Hongo et al. that used a circle instead of an ellipse, and it improved extracted results by 6 points in our agreement index. A real time flesh-colored region extraction system was constructed on a personal computer with a 400 MHz celeron CPU. It could extract flesh-colored regions with the rate of 12 frames, 160×120 pixels each, per second.