A simple and novel method for skin detection and face locating and tracking

Abstract

In many computer vision applications such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and human-motion tracking (HMT), face detection is considered the main step which is also the first step. To detect faces, skin color is considered the most appropriate feature to use. A simple arithmetic on RGB color space components is used in this paper to extract the skin. Elliptical shape fitting is used to locate the face. Then template matching is used to locate the eyes. A very good result is achieved using our simple algorithm. Up to our knowledge, we believe that our skin detection method is one of the most efficient methods being used today. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.