2014 International Symposium on Biometrics and Security Technologies (ISBAST)

Improved Skin Detection based on Dynamic

Threshold using Multi-Colour Space
Mohd. Zamri Osman, Mohd Aizaini Maarof, Mohd Foad Rohani
Information Assurance & Security Research Group (IASRG)
Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
81310 Skudai, Johor Malaysia
mzamri27@gmail.com,{aizaini, foad}@utm.my

Abstract Skin colour detection is widely used in

applications such as adult image filtering, steganography,
content-based image retrieval (CBIR), face tracking, face
recognition, and facial surgery. Recently, researchers are more
interested in developing high level skin detection strategy for
still images based on online sample learning approach which
requires no offline training dataset. Previous dynamic skin
color detection works has shown high true positive result than
the static skin detection in term of skin-like colour and
ethnicity factors. However, dynamic skin colour detection also
produced high false positives result which lowers the accuracy
of skin detection. This is due to the current approach of
elliptical mask model that is not flexible for face rotation and is
based on single colour space. Therefore, we propose dynamic
skin colour detection based on multi-colour space. The result
shows the effectiveness of the proposed method by reducing the
false positive rate from 19.6069% to 6.9887% and increased
the precision rate from 81.27% to 91.49%.
Keywords- multi-colour space, dynamic skin classification,
skin detection, skin colour model

I.

INTRODUCTION

Skin detection is one or two-class classification [1]

problems taken as the fundamental to improve the accuracy
of targeted application which deals with skins existence. In
one class classification problem, skin detection separate the
object of an interest from the image, meanwhile in two-class
problem the whole image is to be discriminated whether it
contains skin pixels or not. However, several factors faced
by the researchers that affects the skin detection rate are skin
tone colour variations, skin-like objects, illumination and
camera characteristic [2]. Other applications that rely on the
skin detection accuracy are adult image filtering [3],
steganography, [4] content-based image retrieval (CBIR) [5],
face recognition, face tracking and facial surgery.
Human skin pixels in an image can be classified in two
ways; either pixel-based or region-based. It has been
reported that pixel-based approach is most widely used due
to several advantages such less computational, robust
information against rotation and partial occlusion [2].
Meanwhile, the region-based approach takes spatial
978-1-4799-6444-4/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

arrangement aspect of pixels in consideration. In addition,

skin detection can be categorized into two strategies which
are low level and high level strategies [6]. In low level
strategy, training phase with large off-line skin samples is
required in order to model the skin colour. On the other hand
high level strategy requires no off-line training which the
skin sample is directly obtained from the face. This strategy
refers to online skin sampling method.
Skin color modeling is used to separate the skin and nonskin pixels by building a decision rules. For instance, explicit
threshold, statistical-based method and neural network are
general categories of skin colour modeling [2, 6, 7]. The
explicit threshold technique uses single or multiple fixed
boundaries for each colour space. Skin pixels are the pixels
that fall within these boundaries and others are classified as
non-skin. In non-parametric technique, a histogram for the
given colour space is built and then converted to a
probability density function (PDF). If the PDF of a given
pixels exceeds a predefined threshold it is considered as skin.
On the other hand, parametric techniques used a modeled
colour space with a prescribed shape. For instance Gaussian
and elliptical boundary model are parametric skin colour
modeling. In addition, neural network or semi-parametric
technique is trained by two sets, skin and non-skin set to
generate the decision rule. Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) and
Self Organized Map (SOP) networks are common
architecture used. Zaidan et al. [8] reviewed that, neural
network technique unable to separate skin-like object and
made an attempts but failed to resolve the illumination
conditions. More details of the skin colour modeling can be
found in [2].
Cheddad et al. [4, 9] proposed a new colour space in 1D
distribution. The fixed threshold values are obtained from the
off-line training samples which requires huge of skin
samples to model the skin. However, this method fails to
handle various conditions such as skin-like objects and
complex background [10]. Subban and Mishra [1] studied
twenty-one combination of explicit skin cluster in different
colour spaces. From the analysis done, three combinations of
two colour spaces can perform better detection accuracy

which are YUV-YIQ,

respectively.

YUV-KL,

and

YCgCr-YES,

Several researchers combine multiple colour space to

build a skin color model. Rahim et al. [11], Wang and Yuan
[12] , Samart et al. [13], Zhu et al. [14] and Xiang and
Suandi [15] introduced a multi-skin colour model using
different colour spaces. For instance, Xiang and Suandi [15]
proposed a fusion of multi colour space for skin
segmentation using YCbCr-YUV and RGB-YUV. It is found
that skin segmentation using RGB-YUV multi-colour space
is better in handling complex image background. Zhu et al.
[14] on the other hand introduced multi-skin colour model
based on rgb-YCbCr for face detection. Meanwhile, Samart
et al. [13] improved the conventional RGB-H-CbCr by
proposed novel rule for face detection based on RGB-HSVYCbCr skin colour model. However, their skin colour
models are static and require off-line training.

This paper is organized as follows. Section II discusses

the proposed work. Section III explains the proposed
dynamic skin colour detection method. The experimental and
evaluation results are discussed in Section IV. Finally, the
conclusion is given in Section V.
II.

THE PROPOSED WORK

As previously discussed in the Section I the proposed

work is based on multi-colour space of RGB, YCbCr and
HSV. In this method, RGB, YCbCr and HSV colour space
will be used to model the skin pixels. These colour space
conversions can be found in the [7]. YCbCr defined in
Equation 1 is an orthogonal space that commonly used by

For the past years, researchers are more interested on

building dynamic or adaptive skin detector [6, 10, 16-18].
This approach does not require offline training skin samples
and less complexity. The motivation of this approach is an
online skin samples that obtained directly from the individual
human face. Yogarajah et al. [16] introduced a dynamic skin
colour detection based on face detected from the images. The
dynamic threshold generated from the face after removed the
non-skin pixels using edge detector and dilation process.
Then, 95% of confident interval margin will be accepted to
model the dynamic threshold. However, from the experiment
done it is shows that this method produced high false
positive (FP) rate. There are a lot of black spot areas
reported from the result. It is reported that in Yogarajah et al.
[16] method there are many black spot in the segmented
area which are false positive. This method classified many
skin pixels. Even though this method improved in term of
true positives rather than the explicit static cluster, the false
positive is also increased.
Current works done by researchers solely focus on
dynamic skin detection in single colour space. Therefore, this
paper proposes dynamic threshold based on multi-colour
space. The motivation of using multi-colour spaces is that,
combining more than one colour spaces it would increase the
skin detection rate compared to single colour space. Our
proposed method does not require any off-line learning. In
skin colour extraction, we used online learning for a
particular image using the human face skin colour
information. We employed Viola-Jones [19] face detector,
then a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to locate the eyes
coordinate. In addition, we propose elastic elliptical mask
model according to the eyes angle. This is due to possibility
of skin pixels is collected according to the face rotation to
reduce too much non-skin selected. The detected face skin
region contains possible non-skin pixels. A Sobel edge
detector and dilation process is used to remove any
possibility of non-skin pixels such as hair, eyebrow to
smoothing the face skin region. Then, we convert the RGB
colour space into YCbCr and HSV colour space.

Fig. 1. Flowchart of the proposed method

(1)

{
)

))

))
(2)

)
European television studios for image compression work.
It represents the luma (which is luminance, computed from
nonlinear RGB). YCbCr capable to separate luminance and
chrominance that makes this colour space attractive for skin
colour modeling. Smooth face skin region is converted into

these colour spaces. A summarized flowchart of the propose

work is illustrated in the Fig. 1.
Fig. 1 shows the flowchart of the proposed method which
includes several phases. The phases can be illustrated in the
following sub-section online skin sampling, single
dynamic threshold and dynamic skin classification. If more

than one face detected in the image, the process looped until
there is no faces detected. Then individual results using
single dynamic threshold will be. This is because, each faces
will generate a unique threshold values according to skin
tone variations obtained from the detected faces.

c
d, eyes
coordinate

center point
(x0,y0)

a, major
axis

b, minor
axis

Fig. 2. Elastic elliptical mask model according to eye angle. C is the

rotation angle, d is the distance between two eye points, (a) and (b)
respectively 1.2d major axis and 1.1d minor axis

III.

DYNAMIC SKIN COLOUR DETECTION

A. Online Skin Sampling Method

Online skin sampling is the process of extracting the
skin pixel directly from the detected face. Here, we
proposed an elastic elliptical mask model that created
according to the eyes coordinate. This is because the high
possibility of skin area if we rotate the elliple according to
the face angle. The elliptical shape is rotated based on the
eyes angle as shown in the
Fig. 2. Parameter d is the distance between two eyes,
while a and b is the major and minor axis of the ellipse
size.
Fig. 3 shows the process of online skin sampling. The
goal of this process is to extract possibility of skin pixels
from the face mask region. However, the face may contain
non-skin pixels such as eyebrow, lips, or hair that need to be
removed. Sobel edge detector is used to detect the edge from
the elastic elliptical mask region (b) and dilation process to
grow the detected edges. The white pixels in the (c) represent
the possibility of non-skin pixels recognized and need to be
removed. Then, a smoothed skin region is produced. Finally,
we convert the existing RGB smoothed skin region to
YCbCr and HSV colour space. However, the smooth skin
region may still exist non-skin pixels. We used histogram
analysis of confident interval with 95% employed for each of
the distribution colour component to determine the accepted
region and classified as skin pixels.
B. Single Dynamic Threshold
The purpose of this phase is to combine multi-threshold
from the multi-colour space of RGB, YCbCr or HSV. Here,
we analyzed several combinations of colour spaces using

(a)

(b)

(c)

(e)

(f)

(d)

Fig. 3. Online skin colour extraction obtained from the face. (a) input, (b)
elastic elliptical mask region based on eye rotation, (c) smooth skin region
using edge detector and dilation process, (d)-(f) RGB, YCbCr and HSV
smoothed skin region

three colour spaces. Initially, we proposed a single dynamic

threshold values for skin detection based on RGB, YCbCr
and HSV colour space. We present several combinations
YCbCr-RGB, CbCr-RGB, YCbCr-SV, and CbCr-SV
respectively. Equation 3 shows the example combination of
two single dynamic thresholds for the CbCr-SV skin colour
model. The lower bound will be the minimum value while
upper bound is the maximum threshold value.

(3)
)
)
Multiple thresholds calculated during the online skin
sampling process. This dynamic threshold values then will
be used to classify the skin and non-skin pixels for still
colour images.
C. Dynamic Skin Classification
Finally, the dynamic threshold values that obtained from
the online skin sampling method will classify the skin pixel
according to the minimum and maximum threshold value
defined by Equation 3. Value 1 represent skin and 0 nonskin pixel. If the input image contains more than one faces,
the proposed method will be looped and applied for
individual faces until there is no face identified. Lastly, the
individual result of each faces will be merged to produce the
final detection output as shown in the Fig. 4. White and

black colour respectively represents skin and non-skin pixel

area.
Face 1

Face 2

Merging
operation
Face 3

(a)

(c)

Face 4

(b)

Fig. 4. Merged result for more than one faces. (a) Input image, (b) individual threshold result, (c) final result

Fig. 5. Qualitative comparison using Pratheepan dataset [16] of single face. From left to right represents the input image, ground truth, Yogarajah et al.
method [16], Tan et al. method [17] and our proposed method

IV.

EXPERIMENT AND EVALUATION

In this section, the performance of the proposed method

applied on the different image conditions, skin tones, colour
spaces are compared with the state-of-the-art works. As for
our study, only frontal face is considered for evaluation. We
perform quantitative analysis under different combination of
colour space and qualitative analysis on the Pratheepan
dataset [16]. Since the ground truth is not available, therefore
we provide the ground truth for Pratheepan dataset and it can
be access at [20].

From the analysis done, it shows that combination of

YCbCr-SV provides better performance compared to the
other three combined colour space and even single colour
space. YCbCr-SV generate less false positive. In addition,
high precision and accuracy demonstrated. On the other
hand, qualitative evaluation is presented in Figure 5. For
qualitative evaluation purpose, we compare the result of our
proposed method with Yogarajah et al. [16] and Tan et al.
[17]. As shown in the Figure 5, Yogarajah et al. [16] result
generates a lot of non-skin pixels. Tan et al. [17] generate
better result rather than Yogarajah, but still have much non-

skin pixels. Last column is the result from our proposed

method. We managed to generate less false positive result by
classified less non-skin pixels. Table 1 shows the
quantitative comparison of the proposed method based on
several combination of colour space.
TABLE I.

[2]

[3]

COMPARISON RESULT USING DIFFERENT COLOUR SPACES

6.9887

Accuracy
(%)
84.05

Precision
(%)
91.49

CbCr-SV

6.9984

83.48

91.48

YCbCr-RGB

8.3235

83.48

90.04

CbCr-RGB

8.8040

83.81

89.67

CbCr

14.8803

85.86

85.45

RGB

17.6375

83.32

85.33

HSV

19.6069

81.57

81.27

Skin Colour Model

FP (%)

YCbCr-SV

We analyzed three combinations of colour spaces with

single colour space. Based on the results, it clearly shows
that the false positive rate can be reduced significantly from
19.6069% to 6.9887 by combining multi-colour space into a
single skin colour model. Result in Table 1 also shows that
YCbCr-SV, CbCr-SV and YCbCr-RGB perform well than
single colour space. Among the combined colour space,
YCbCr-SV generates less false positive result, high
accuracy and high precision. However, our proposed
method sometime fails in handling image that contains too
many faces. This is because of the proposed method is only
depending on the performance of face detector and this
problem also faced by other researchers that studies in this
domain. False face detection will result in wrong threshold
value and finally will produce poor detected skin regions.
V.

CONCLUSION

This paper proposes an improvement on the dynamic

skin detection based on multi-colour space which reduced
the false positive rate in the detection of skin region. We also
proposed an elastic elliptical mask model based on the eye
angle. From the experimental results, we managed to reduce
the false positive compared to the previous dynamic skin
detection method. The improved method also increased the
precision rate compared to the single skin colour model
using the multi-colour space.

[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to acknowledge Ministry of
Higher Education (MOHE) and Universiti Teknologi
Malaysia (UTM) for supporting this research under Research
University Grant (RUG) vote 10J28 and Science Fund Grant
(MOSTI) vote 01-01-06-SF1167. We would also like to
thanks to Dr. See Seng Chan from Universiti Malaya,
Malaysia for giving an access to their dataset.
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