Adaptive skin detection using face location and facial structure estimation

Reliable and accurate facial skin extraction is the most critical and urgent issue for adaptive skin detection. Aiming at resolving this issue, the authors propose an adaptive skin detection method using face location and facial structure estimation. The face location algorithm is developed to improve the reliability of face detection and extract a face region with a high proportion of skin. Facial structure estimation is exploited to further reduce the impact of non-skin factors on dynamic skin colour modelling. The colour space distribution model of extracted facial skin is very close to that of real facial skin. Finally, the skin in an image is obtained by using a hybrid colour space strategy. Extensive experimental comparisons with some state-of-the-art methods have shown the superior performance of the proposed method.