A Proposal of the Modified HSV Colour System Suitable for Human Face Extraction

Abstract

We have proposed a human-face extraction technique using the HSV colour system and confirmed the effectiveness of this method experimentally. However, the colour black, which is expected to have a lower saturation in the HSV colour system, can not be shown accurately. In the conventional system, this feature has some adverse effects on humam-face extraction.
To cope with this problem, a modified HSV colour system is proposed. In the proposed transformation, the saturation is defined as a distance from a chromatic colour. This representation has the following advantages :
(1) Black is represented as the colour with lower saturation.
(2) While human-skin colours are conspicuous in the conventional system, they are well-emphasized in the proposed system.
Computer simulation using 111 pictures with various backgrounds shows an 89% extracting accuracy. From the experimental results, the prospects of using the modified HSV colour system for human-face extraction are encouraging.