An adaptive real-time skin detector based on Hue thresholding: A comparison on two motion tracking methods

Various applications like face and hand tracking and image retrieval have made skin detection an important area of research. However, currently available algorithms are based on static features of the skin colour, or require a significant amount of computation. On the other hand, skin detection algorithms are not robust to deal with real-world conditions, like background noise, change of intensity and lighting effects. This situation can be improved by using dynamic features of the skin colour in a sequence of images. This article proposes a skin detection algorithm based on adaptive Hue thresholding and its evaluation using two motion detection technique. The skin classifier is based on the Hue histogram of skin pixels, and adapts itself to the colour of the skin of the persons in the video sequence. This algorithm has demonstrated improvement in comparison to the static skin detection method. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.