Lip region segmentation with complex background

As the first step of many visual speech recognition and visual speaker authentication systems, robust and accurate lip region segmentation is of vital importance for lip image analysis. However, most of the current techniques break down when dealing with lip images with complex and inhomogeneous background region such as mustaches and beards. In order to solve this problem, a Multi-class, Shape-guided FCM (MS-FCM) clustering algorithm is proposed in this chapter. In the proposed approach, one cluster is set for the lip region and a combination of multiple clusters for the background which generally includes the skin region, lip shadow or beards. With the spatial distribution of the lip cluster, a spatial penalty term considering the spatial location information is introduced and incorporated into the objective function such that pixels having similar color but located in different regions can be differentiated. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides accurate lip-background partition even for the images with complex background features. © 2009, IGI Global.