A rule based human skin detection method in cmyk color space

Abstract

Skin detection is a very important task in computer vision, since we can find it in many applications such as face detection and recognition, face tracking, gesture analysis, content-based image retrieval systems and human machine interaction systems. In this paper we present a novel rule-based skin detection method in the Cyan Magenta Yellow Key (CMYK) color space. This space is a subtractive color space used in color printing, and poorly explored in image processing and still less in skin detection tasks. Our method uses thresholds which are based on the relation between CMYK color components in order to recognize skin pixels, two thresholding models were proposed and we have considered the most performing one. The proposed method has been tested on two public skin image databases and has achieved very satisfactory qualitative and quantitative results against other widely used rule-based methods.