A New Face Detection Algorithm Based on Skin
Color Segmentation
Yuanbo Yang, Chenggang Xie, Liebo Du, Qin Lu
College of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation
National University of Defense Technology, NUDT
ChangSha, China
workyyb@126.com
Abstract—In this paper, a new face detection approach based
on skin color segmentation is presented. First, the color image is
converted into YCgCrcolor space from RGB, because
the performance of clustering is excellent in YCgCr color space.
We get the segmented image by using the algorithm of support
vector machine in YCgCr color space. Finally, we offer a face
verification algorithm according to the geometric features of face
after morphological operation to wide off non-face areas.
Experimental results show that the method is valid, fast and
suitable for rapid detection system.
Keywords—face detection; Skin segmentation; support vector
machine; YCgCr color space
I. INTRODUCTION
With the development of information technology and
pattern recognition, the authentication based on face
recognition began to apply in finance, security and other fields.
Face recognition become a hot subject of research currently.
Face detection is a key technology of face recognition, which
began in the 1960s. Further more, face detection is the first step
in human computer interaction system. Early face detection
algorithm is mainly based on spatial characteristics, such as
template matching and other simple features. However the
algorithm is poor adaptability because of variability in facial
expression, pose, and lighting condition.
After decades of development, the current face detection
algorithms are mainly divided into two large categories based
on the structure and pixel. The algorithm based on the structure
detects faces use the spatial distribution of facial features. Viola
and Jones presented a face detection algorithm [1] using
boosted cascade of Haar-like features, which is the classical
algorithm based on facial structure. Pixel-based algorithm uses
the clustering performance of skin color in the color space to
detecting. First, the RGB image is converted to a different
color space and then clusters, such as color space of YCbCr,
HSV, CIE-Luv and CIE-Lab. The first algorithm has reached a
high level after improving by researchers. But, this algorithm
consumes long time for high-resolution images because of
large amount of calculation. So, it cannot be used in real-time
system directly. The advantage of the second algorithm is the
fast calculation because of less iteration. However, the skin
areas detected may include many non face regions due to the
978-1-4673-7189-6/15/$31.00©2015 IEEE
greater differences of light, image sensor and other external
environment factors.
The effect of lighting compensation on the skin color
distribution is studied in section II. In this section, the result of
clustering performance in different color space is compared.
Different skin color segmentation methods are studied and
compared in section III. We select the method of support vector
machine algorithm to segment the skin color. Experimental
results are given in section IV. Section V is conclusion.
II. COLOR SPACE
A. Lighting Compensation
In reality, the picture we get from camera will inevitably be
affected by illumination variation. In order to eliminate this
adverse influence, the picture needs to be compensated before
converting to other color space. There are two lighting
compensation methods, "Reference White" [2] and “Gray
World Theory” [3]. “Reference white” method assumes that
the image usually contains “real white” pixels. The pixels with
top 5% of luminance values are regarded as the reference
white. The R, G, and B components of a color image are
adjusted so that the average gray value of these reference white
pixels is linearly scaled to 255 [4]. The basic idea of "Gray
World" assumption is that the average value of R, G, and B in
an image should be consistent. We adopt the “Gray World”
assumption because this method is simple. It can be described
as follows [5].
­ ª K º ª K º ª K º
°R ' = R ∗ « » ,G ' = G ∗ « »,B' = B∗« »
° «¬ Raverage »¼ «¬ Gaverage »¼ «¬ Baverage »¼ (1)
®
° Raverage + Gaverage + Baverage
°K =
¯ 3
R, G and B in (1) are the amount of stimulus of red, green and
blue respectively in the recorded scenery. Gaverage , Raverage and
Baverage are the average of each color channel. The result after
compensating is shown in Fig. 1. It is obvious that the
luminance of the image has been changed.
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 Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show that the lighting compensation
method is resultful. The skin pixels are adjusted to correct
position in Cr-Cg plane and Cr-Cb plane.
Cr-Cg
Cr
80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220
60

70

80

90

(a)
100

Cg
110

120

130

140

150

(a) Cr-Cg
Cr-Cb
Cr
80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220
90

100

((b) 110

120

Fig. 1. (a) Orignal image, (b) Image after compensation 130

Cb
140

B. YCgCr Color Space

150

160

Generally color images are described and stored in three 170

components of R, G and B. They contain the luminance 180

information. If we use the three components as the

(b) Cr-Cb
representation of skin color directly, it is not effective for skin
color segmentation because of poor performance clustering. Fig. 2. Distribution of skin color in Cr-Cg and Cr-Cb
Therefore, we need the original RGB color image is converted
into other color space whose chrominance and luminance are Cr-Cg
Cr
separated. Now, the YCbCr color space is widely used in the 60
80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220

research of establishment of skin color model. There are a lot 70

of relevant literatures. Y indicates the luminance component. 80

Cb and Cr represent the blue component and the red 90

component respectively. The skin color has good performance 100

of clustering in Cb-Cr color space. The distribution of skin

Cg

110

color in different color space was studied in paper [6] and 120

paper [7]. YCgCr and YCbCr color space is similar, except the 130

Cg and Cb component. De Dios and Garcia [8] derived the 140

conversion formula of YCgCr and RGB from the conversion 150

formula of YCbCr and RGB. And they show the excellent (a)
performance of YCgCr color space. The conversion formulas Cr-Cg
are shown as (2) and (3). Cr
80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220
60

ª Y º ª16 º ª 0.256 0.5041 0.0979 º ª R º 70

«Cb » = «128» + « −0.1482 −0.291 0.4392 » «G » (2)

80

« » « » « »« » 90

«¬ Cr ¼» ¬«128¼» ¬« 0.4392 −0.3677 −0.0714 »¼ «¬ B »¼ 100

Cg

110

ª Y º ª16 º ª 0.256 0.5041 0.0979 º ª R º 120

«Cg » = «128» + « −0.318 0.4392 −0.1212 » «G » (3) 130

« » « » « »« » 140

«¬ Cr »¼ «¬128»¼ «¬ 0.4392 −0.3677 −0.0714 »¼ «¬ B »¼ 150

Experiments show that YCgCr is better than YCbCr in (b)

performance of clustering. The distribution of skin color in Cr-
Fig. 3. Distribution of skin color in Cr-Cg, (a) Before compensation (b) After
Cg and Cr-Cb space is shown in Fig. 2. The distribution of skin compensation.
color before and after lighting compensation in Cr-Cg is shown
in Fig. 3. The distribution of skin color before and after lighting
compensation in Cr-Cb is shown in Fig. 4.

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 Cr-Cb
Cr
80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220
90

100

110

120

130
Cb

140

150
(a) Original image (b) Threshold segmentation
160

170

180

(a)
Cr-Cb
Cr
80 100 120 140 160 180 200 220
90

100

110
(c) Segmentation of Gaussian model (d) Method in this paper
120

130
Fig. 5. Result of different segmentation methods
Cb

140

150 Cr-Cg
Cr
160
120 130 140 150 160 170

170
90

180
100

(b)
110

Fig. 4. Distribution of skin color in Cr-Cb, (a) Before compensation (b) After

Cg
120
compensation
130

140
III. FACE DETECTION

A. Skin Detection
After converting the color space, the clustering of skin
color is better. It is necessary for establishing the model of skin
color. There are many models of skin color. Threshold
segmentation is the simplest method, which has fast computing
speed. The disadvantage of this method is that the model is not
accurate enough. A lot of non-skin pixels are determined as
skin pixel if the threshold value is too large. However, if the
threshold value is too small, many skin pixels cannot be
detected. One reliable method is the Gaussian skin color model,
which calculates the similarity to determine skin color area [6].
In fact, Gaussian model is the approximation model for skin
color. Skin color is not strictly Gaussian distribution. The
classification is not very accurate though it is better than
threshold segmentation method. Skin detection can be regard as
a classification problem of two categories, namely skin and
non-skin. The support vector machine is an effective method to
solve two classification problems. The segmentation results of
different segmentation methods are shown in Fig. 5. We can
get the distribution of skin color in specific color space by a lot
of samples. We will get the appropriate solution of the problem
by setting the appropriate parameters after training the samples.
In this paper, 369 positive samples and 521 negative samples
are used. The final classification results are shown in Fig. 6.
B. Face Verification
There are always some pixels exist which is similar to skin
color in real scenes. The results of segmentation will inevitably
appear some interference. At the same time there are many non
Fig. 6. The classification result of skin color and non-skin color in Cr-Cg use
SVM. Yellow region is the skin area and the other region is non-skin area.
face regions, such as the arm and other parts of the body, which
are not what we need. So we need to confirm the area detected.
First, the noise is removed through morphological operations.
Then the hole in binary picture is filled. Considering the
geometry characteristics of face, we provide a face verification
algorithm. The criterion of the algorithm is shown below.
(1) Removing small area.
(2) Aspect ratio of circumscribing rectangle is 0.5 to 1.8.
(3) Because the face is symmetric in vertical and horizontal
directions, so we divide the circumscribing rectangle of skin
region into three sections from top to bottom, as show in Fig. 7
(a). Then we calculate the difference for the left and right parts
of each section to get the ratio of total area. For example in part
A, the sum of the white pixels which lie in the black rectangle
of Fig. 7 (b) is subtracted from the sum of white pixels in the
white rectangle of Fig. 7 (b). Then we get the ratio value of
total numbers of white pixels in Fig. 7 (a). The sum of three
ratio values of A, B and C should be greater than a threshold.
The parameter of threshold is set to 0.2 in this paper. If the sum
less than the threshold, we think this area is not face.
(4) In the same way, the circumscribing rectangle of skin
region is divided into three parts from left to right as shown in
Fig.8. The parameter of threshold is set to 0.2.

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 (a) (b)
Fig. 7. Step 3 for face Verification
(a) (b)
Fig. 8. Step 4 for face Verification
For example, Fig. 9 (b) is the binary picture of image in
Fig. 9 (a) after step 1. The skin regions detected of Fig. 9 (a) is
shown in Fig. 9 (c). The rectangle of 1st is removed after step 2.
The rectangle of 2nd, 3rd and 4th are removed after step 3 and
step 4.
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
Fig. 9. Example of face verification
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The test set in this article comes from laboratory and AFW
dataset [9]. We use 20 pictures to train which are selected
randomly from the test set. There are 20 faces totally for
testing. 16 faces are detected correctly and 3 non-faces are
detected. The accuracy is 80% and the error rate is 15%. Parts
of the experimental results are shown in Fig. 10. Experiment is
tested in Intel (R) Core (TM) i5-4210@1.7GHz 2.4GHz,
Windows7, Visual Studio 2010.
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Fig. 10. Partial experimental results
V. CONCLUSION
This paper describes a new face detection algorithm which
calculates fast. Support vector machine algorithm is applied to
skin color segmentation and the result is better than other
methods. In future, we will improve the algorithm by
combining the other features, for example Haar-like feature.

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