A hybrid skin color detection using HSV and YCgCr color space for face detection

Skin detection is a key aspect of many computer vision applications including face detection, person identification, illicit content detection and other related applications. In this paper, a skin detection method is proposed combining two color spaces HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) and YCgCr (luminance, chrominance in green, chrominance in red). The S, Cg and Cr components are used to form a hybrid SCgCr color space. Skin detection results show that, the proposed method can respond well to different skin color tones with less sensitivity to skin-like background pixels. It is also shown that higher face detection rate can be achieved when applied to face detection problem.