Exploiting automatic image segmentation to human detection and depth estimation

In this paper, we combine image segmentation techniques and face detection methods to extract the human from scenes. Firstly, skin regions are detected and an ellipse fitting method is employed to detect the face region and consequently locate the human position. Then we propose an improved automatic seeded region growing algorithm to segment the image. The initial seeds are generated automatically, and the remaining pixels are classified to the nearest region. After the region growing procedure, two neighboring regions with high similarity are merged. The human body is determined by confining semantic human body region in segmented regions, and those belonging to the human face and human body are merged afterward. Lastly, we will detect the human vertical y-coordinate values in the image, and the depths can then be estimated according to the depth look-up tables of the camera.