Face detection using skin tone segmentation

Human face detection has become a major field of interest in current research because there is no deterministic algorithm to find face(s) in a given image. Further the algorithms that exist are very much specific to the kind of images they would take as input and detect faces. The problem is to detect faces in the given, colored group photograph. In this paper, an improved segmentation algorithm for face detection in color images with multiple faces and skin tone regions is proposed. Algorithm ingeniously uses a novel skin color model, RGB-HS-CbCr for the detection of human faces. Skin regions are extracted using a set of bounding rules based on the skin color distribution obtained from a training set. The segmented face regions are further classified using a parallel combination of simple morphological operations. Experimental results on a large photo data set have demonstrated that the proposed model is able to achieve good detection success rates for near-frontal faces of varying orientations, skin color and background environment.