Skin Segmentation Based on Graph Cuts

Skin segmentation is widely used in many computer vision tasks to improve automated visualization. This paper presents a graph cuts algorithm to segment arbitrary skin regions from images. The detected face is used to determine the foreground skin seeds and the background non-skin seeds with the color probability distributions for the foreground represented by a single Gaussian model and for the background by a Gaussian mixture model. The probability distribution of the image is used for noise suppression to alleviate the influence of the background regions having skin-like colors. Finally, the skin is segmented by graph cuts, with the regional parameter γ optimally selected to adapt to different images. Tests of the algorithm on many real world photographs show that the scheme accurately segments skin regions and is robust against illumination variations, individual skin variations, and cluttered backgrounds. © 2009 Tsinghua University Press.