Does Colorspace Transformation Make Any Difference on Skin Detection?

Skin detection is an important process in many of computer vision algorithms. It usually is a process that starts at a pixel-level, and that involves a pre-process of colorspace transformation followed by a classification process. A colorspace transformation is assumed to increase separability between skin and non-skin classes, to increase similarity among different skin tones, and to bring a robust performance under varying illumination conditions, without any sound reasonings. In this work, we examine if the colorspace transformation does bring those benefits by measuring four separability measurements on a large dataset of 805 images with different skin tones and illumination. Surprising results indicate that most of the colorspace transformations do not bring the benefits which have been assumed. 1

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: WACV
• Authors: Min C. Shin, Kyong I. Chang, Leonid V. Tsap
• Keywords: Colorspace Transformations, Computer Vision, Important Process, Skin Detection, WACV 2002