The Visual Computer

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-021-02108-3

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A novel approach for human skin detection using convolutional neural

network
Khawla Ben Salah1,2 · Mohamed Othmani3 · Monji Kherallah4

Accepted: 6 March 2021

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021

Abstract
Human skin detection, which is one of the important pre-processing phases, has a wide range of applications such as face
tracking, skin diseases, video surveillance, web content filtering, and so on. Skin detection is a challenging problem because
skin color can vary dramatically in its appearance due to many factors such as illumination conditions, pose variations, race,
aging, and complex background. Several methods dealing with skin detection assume that skin pixels can be extracted from
background colors according to some thresholding rules related to a specific color model. Nevertheless, it is a complex task
to recognize skin pixels under the challenging factors aforementioned. In the recent era, the success of deep convolutional
neural network (CNN) has strongly influenced the field of computer vision. However, we could find only a few researches that
apply deep learning methods to deal with the skin detection problem. This paper presents a novel approach based on CNN
for skin detection. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach exceeds the best result for other state-of-the-art
methods.

Keywords Skin detection · Color models · Deep learning · Convolutional neural networks

1 Introduction detection [7], to a variety of computational health informatics

The detection of human skin, i.e., the process of distinguish-
ing between “skin” and “non-skin” pixels in an image or a
video, is a very eminent task for several applications ranging
from face detection [1], semantic filtering of web contents
[2], image enhancement [3], gesture analysis [4], surveil-
lance systems [5], dermatology diagnostics [6], driver fatigue
B Khawla Ben Salah
khawlabensalah8@gmail.com
Mohamed Othmani
mohamed.othmani@yahoo.fr
Monji Kherallah
monji.kherallah@fss.usf.tn
1 National Engineering School of Sfax, University of Sfax, BP
1173, Sfax, Tunisia
2 Research Lab: Math, Earth Sciences, Modeling and
Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Sciences of Gafsa, University
of Gafsa, Gafsa, Tunisia
3 Faculty of Sciences of Gafsa, University of Gafsa, BP 2100,
Gafsa, Tunisia
4 Faculty of Sciences of Sfax, University of Sfax, BP 1173,
Sfax, Tunisia
[8]. Skin detection has been proven to be highly compli-
cated with a wide variation in the appearance of the skin,
depending on its own properties, and is also influenced by
a spread of other factors (low illumination, camera char-
acteristics, complex background, subject movement, etc.).
Previous methods like [9,10] have tried to specify the skin
color in several color models and have suggested skin thresh-
olds in these models. The most known color models that
can be used are RGB, YCbCr, and HSV [11–13]. They can
be used separately or combined [14]. However, these meth-
ods are firmly based on the color distribution of the sample,
and there is no semantic information involved; they do not
reach excellent performance. Recently, convolutional neu-
ral networks (CNN) have shown very promising results on
computer vision tasks, such as image classification and object
detection [15]. In this study, we present CNN architecture and
a training strategy for skin detection. To reduce false posi-
tives, our training strategy consists of patch-based training
which is robust to background clutter and detects skin pixels
precisely. We propose an efficient and performing algorithm
to detect and extract skin pixels from the whole RGB image
after integrating the trained model. The proposed approach
overcomes most of the difficulties in skin detection. We also

123

use color purification methods before the skin color detection
step to enhance the effectiveness of results, which was not
present in previous studies. To improve the computational
efficiency of the skin model, we generate a new dataset from
SFA. Three methods for skin color detection in addition to
our approach have been tested in this work.
2 Related work
2.1 Color model methods
Different color models are applied in many applications such
as TV broadcasting, image processing, computer graphics,
and computer vision [16–18]. The most common ones are
YCbCr and HSV. The choice of color model is the primary
process for modeling skin color and further for classification
[19]. According to [20], HSV is classified as a perceptual
uniform model and YCbCr as an orthogonal model, and
YCbCr is chosen as the most suited for skin detection prob-
lem because orthogonal models are characterized by lower
correlation between components.
2.1.1 YCbCr color model
This color model is often used in image compression. The
luminance (also called Luma) is presented by the component
Y and calculated by a weighted sum of the components of R,
G, and B [21]
Y = 0.299 × R + 0.587 × G + 0.114 × B. (1)
The other two components of this color model represent
the chrominance, and they are calculated from Luma:
Cr = R − Y (2)
Cb = B − Y; (3)
only the two components Cb and Cr are retained for the appli-
cation of the thresholding defined as follows [22]:
((Cb >= 77) and (Cb <= 127)), (4)
and
((Cr >= 133) and (Cr <= 173)). (5)
2.1.2 HSV color model
HSV is a color model called “natural”, in other words, close
to the physiological perception of color by the human eye.
It decomposes colors according to physiological criteria as
illustrated in Fig. 1:
123
K. B. Salah et al.
Fig. 1 Illustration of the HSV color model
– H is the hue: corresponds to the color perception;
– S is the saturation: describes the color purity, simply its
vivid character or dull;
– V is the value: indicates the light quantity in the color, if
it has light or dark appearance.
In the HSV color model, the intensity is represented by the
component V. This component must be abandoned in the
process of skin detection. Only the H and S components are
maintained which represent the chrominance. The skin color
detection, according to the HSV model, is realized by the
conversion of the original image from the RGB model to the
HSV model respecting the following thresholds [23].
0 <= H <= 0.25 (6)
0.15 <= S <= 0.9. (7)
2.1.3 HSCbCr model
HSCbCr represents the combination between HSV model
and YCbCr model. In fact, H and S components are taken
from the HSV model and the two other components (Cb,
Cr) are taken from the YCbCr model. Y and H contain the
lighting information which adds no information to the color
of human skin. Therefore, these two components have been
excluded.
2.2 Methods based on deep learning
A fair comparison between works based on deep learning
for skin detection is difficult due to the unavailability of
a common benchmark. A fully convolutional neural net-
work method for skin segmentation was present in [24]. The
authors make experiments on many CNN structures to deter-
mine the best one. A handcrafted skin dataset was provided
in their study consisting of three well-known ECU, SFA, and
Pratheepan datasets. The first and second datasets were used
A novel approach for human skin detection using convolutional neural network
Fig. 2 Generation of a new dataset from SFA. Training set, testing set,
and validating set are three folders each containing a set of skin patches
and a set of non-skin patches
during the training phase. Pratheepan was used in the testing
phase. The authors compare their work to the state-of-the-art
methods (Bayesian [2], FSD [25], LASD [26], FPSD [27],
DSPF [28], SPSD [29], patch-VGG [30], patch-NiN [30],
Image-VGG [30], and Image-NiN [30]) using the Pratheepan
dataset. Table 5 presents the results of the related work men-
tioned in [24] as well as the results of our approach.
3 Proposed approach
This section presents details of the proposed approach. First,
we give a general overview of the approach. After that, we
discuss each phase in detail. The same algorithm steps are
applied to the color models in order to compare our approach
to classical methods, as detailed in Sect. 3.4.
3.1 Overview
In this paper, we attempt to address the problem of skin detec-
tion in two steps. The first step of our proposed approach is
training a patch-based convolutional neural network (Sect.
3.2) which takes as input patches classified as skin or non-
skin. To train our model, we generated a new dataset from the
SFA dataset as shown in Fig. 2. For the second step, we pro-
pose a skin detection algorithm which scan the whole image
after integrating the trained model. This approach (Sect. 3.3)
can detect, localize, and extract the human skin region of the
input image. All steps of the proposed approach are shown
in Fig. 5.
3.2 Convolutional neural network for skin detection
Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a category of models
dedicated to extracting features from 2D inputs (e.g., images)
[31]. CNN served in many applications such as image pro-
cessing [32], pattern recognition [33], and several other types
of cognitive tasks [34]. A typical CNN includes three types
of layers: the convolutional layer, the max-pooling layer, and
the fully connected layer. In this study, CNN has been used
successfully as a skin classifier. The training strategy used in
this work is based on skin and non-skin patches because of its
rapid convergence time compared with whole image-based
training. They go through a stack of multiple convolutions,
one max-pooling layer followed by two fully connected lay-
ers and an output layer as shown in Fig. 3. The convolution
layers (1, 2, 3) are convolved with their respective kernel
number (16, 32, and 64). After the block of convolution lay-
ers, the max-pooling layer, also known as a down-sampling
layer, is applied to the feature maps. It was employed to min-
imize computational complexity and supervise overfitting.
The stride for previous layers is set at 1. Padding was used
after the first convolution layer, and it was set at 1. Nonlin-
earity is presented in the model by offering all layers with
the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function. ReLU
does not saturate, thereby better gradient propagation com-
pared to sigmoid and hyperbolic tan activation functions. The
mathematical form of ReLU function is as follows:
f (x) = max(0, x) (8)
where x is the input to a neuron. 1 × 1 filters are employed
in the first and the third convolutional layers and 2 × 2 fil-
ter in the second one since skin patches from 1 × 1 to 35
× 35 are used, which is different from most of the previous
models that used larger filters (e.g., 3 × 3 or 5 × 5). For
training this architecture, a large dataset SFA is used, con-
sisting of approximately 160,992 skin and no skin patches.
Positive samples coincide with skin image patches, and neg-
ative ones correspond to non-skin image patches. We were
convinced that the SFA dataset is large and diverse enough
to detect skin pixels due to the variation in races and col-
ors of these samples. The details of each layer parameters
of the proposed skin detection CNN model are presented
in Table 1. Because we are facing a binary classification
problem (skin or non-skin) and the output of our model is
a probability (we end our network with a single-unit layer
with a sigmoid activation), the best choice was to configure
the model with the rmsprop optimizer and the binary cross-
entropy loss function. Dropout [35] is a regularization model
123

Fig. 3 The proposed skin detection CNN model
Fig. 4 An example of a skin pixel map obtained with YCbCr method.
a The ground truth image and b the skin pixel map
with low calculation cost and strong deep learning ability. In
dropout, a hyper-parameter of neuron sampling probability
(p) is chosen. While the default value is set as 0.5, it is not
a norm, and thus, it must be constantly tested with different
data and networks. To prevent the problem of overfitting, we
inject dropout several times; particularly, each hidden unit
in the model must learn to cooperate with different sampled
neurons, which renders the neurons more vigorous and leads
them to acquire useful features, rather than relying on other
neurons to rectify their errors. Finally, the training and testing
of the CNN were done in 100 epochs and a batch size of 128
samples. These parameters were changed until the optimum
performance was reached (Fig. 4).
3.3 The proposed algorithm
The algorithm for human skin detection based on the trained
model is explained as follows:
1. Input image is an RGB image from the new generated
SFA dataset;
123
K. B. Salah et al.
2. Function: Extraction of the mask. Step 0 to step 9 are
shown in Fig. 5;
(a) New image is created with same dimensions as the
original images (512 × 768) but in grayscale color,
initialized to 0 (black) and named image number 1;
(b) New grayscale image is created with dimensions 1 ×
1, initialized to 255 (White) and named image number
2;
(c) The original image is scanned pixel by pixel and each
time checked if this pixel is skin or non-skin with the
trained CNN model;
(d) If the pixel is skin, image number 2 will be pasted on
image number 1 with the tested pixel’s coordinates.
3. The mask is smoothened (purification) using morpholog-
ical operations (thresholding, closing, opening);
4. The skin area is extracted by tracing the mask on the
original image. The result is illustrated in Fig. 6;
5. Evaluation of skin detection: is by employing ground
truth and the skin map extracted.
3.4 Skin detection using color models
The algorithm used in the detection of human skin in colored
images is explained as follows:
1. Input image is an RGB image from the new generated
SFA dataset as seen in Fig. 2;
2. The mask is obtained for each image by applying the
predefined thresholding;
3. The mask is smoothened (purification) using morpholog-
ical operations (thresholding, closing, opening);
4. The skin area is extracted by tracing the mask on the
original image;
5. Evaluation of skin detection is by employing ground
truth images, where the skin pixels have been manually
selected. The ground truth is fundamental to generate
A novel approach for human skin detection using convolutional neural network

Table 1 The architecture of the

Layers No. Type Kernel size No. kernels Stride Output shape
proposed skin detection CNN
model Layer 1 Conv 1 1×1 16 1 1 × 1 × 16
Layer 2 Conv 2 2×2 32 1 2 × 2 × 32
Layer 3 Conv 3 1×1 64 1 2 × 2 × 64
Layer 4 Max pooling 1 2×2 0 1 × 1 × 64
Layer 5 Flatten 1 64
Layer 6 Dense 1 128 128
Layer 7 Dense 2 64 64
Layer 8 Dense 3 1 1

Fig. 5 Framework of the proposed skin detection algorithm. The skin map is constructed progressively and displayed in steps 0–9. Each pixel of
the image is predicted with the trained model

four values: true positive (TP), true negative (TN), false

positive (FP), and false negative (FN) that are obtained
by comparing the ground truth image and the obtained
skin map. An example is seen in Fig. 4, (a) is the ground
truth image and (b) is an example of skin pixel map of
the YCbCr method.

Fig. 6 Result of skin detection with CNN approach on an example of

SFA dataset

123

Fig. 7 Illustration of samples on SFA dataset
Table 2 Numbers of the new generated dataset
Types of image Quantity Quantity used
Original images 1118 876a
Ground truths 1118 876a
Skin samples 3354b 3354b
Non-skins samples 5590b 5590b
Total of images 163,228 162,744
a Images have the same dimension (512 × 768)
b For each one of the 18 different dimensions
4 Experimental results
Our algorithm was evaluated on a PC workstation with 2.6
GHz CPU, 32 GB of memory, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX
1650 GPU card. All methods were executed using Spyder
(Python 3.7). The best model results are obtained in epoch
number 84. It takes 31 ms/step and leads to training loss =
0.1026, training binary accuracy = 0.9625, validation loss =
0.0413, and validation binary accuracy = 0.9485 as shown in
Fig. 10. The proposed approach was tested on SFA dataset
and Pratheepan dataset. SFA dataset [36] is based on images
of FERET and AR face datasets. SFA is made up of the
original images, the ground truths for benchmark the skin
detection, and the patches of skin and non-skin. The dimen-
sions of patches vary from 1 × 1 pixels to 35 × 35 pixels
as shown in Fig. 7. The total of images is 163,228. Table 2
shows the numbers of the new generated dataset.
This dataset combines photos of people from various
ethnic groups and contains some photos with illumination
variation. In addition, there are some photos with com-
plex non-skin but skin-colored regions. Pratheepan [37] is
a small dataset that includes 78 downloaded from Google.
The dataset is divided into two subsets: FacePhoto includ-
ing 32 single subject images and family photo including 46
images with multiple objects and complex backgrounds. To
evaluate our experiments, we defined five metrics: accuracy,
recall, IOU, MCC, and F-measure. Accuracy can be abnor-
mally steep despite a small number of true positives (TP) or
123
K. B. Salah et al.
Table 3 Confusion matrix of binary skin detection problem
Predicted as skin Predicted as non-skin
GT skin True positive (TP) False negative (FN)
GT non-skin False positive (FP) True negative (TN)
false negatives (FN). In such cases, F-measure and MCC are
excellent quantification measures for binary classification.
In the skin detection studies, TP is the number of skin pixels
correctly distributed as skin pixels. TN is the number of non-
skin pixels correctly distributed as non-skin pixels. FP is the
number of the non-skin pixels incorrectly classified as skin
pixels. FN is the number of skin pixels incorrectly classified
as non-skin pixels. A confusion matrix as shown in Table 3
details the metrics (TP, TN, FP, and TN) used for the eval-
uation of skin detection. Table 4 illustrates the comparison
between our proposed approach and other color models. The
proposed approach achieved an accuracy, a recall, and IOU
of 92.39%, 96.00%, and 0.7601, respectively. It can be noted
that the best F-measure and Matthews correlation coefficient
(MCC) were achieved by the proposed method, i.e., 95.00%
and 81.26%, which demonstrates its excellent capacity for
addressing the challenge. The MCC of 81% is high, also
indicating that the ground truth and the predicted image have
a high correlation. Figure 8 shows the skin detection result
obtained using the proposed algorithm. The first column of
Fig. 8 represents an original image from the SFA dataset. The
second column denotes the result of YCbCr color model on
the same dataset. The third column denotes the result of HSV.
The next one presents the result of a combination between
HSV and YCbCr. The last column represents the results of
the proposed CNN approach. These methods don’t produce
better results as compared to our proposed approach (Fig. 8e).
If the color of the hair (golden) and the clothes have the same
color as the skin, the hair or the clothes are detected as skin
regions resulting in false positives as shown in Fig. 8b–d.
However, the background is correctly classified if it has a
color different from the color skin. The problem with these
methods is in classifying clothes and hair for some images as
skin. Our proposed approach succeeds in identifying some
parts of the face (lips, eyebrows, eyes, neck), accessories
(earrings, glasses, necklace), shadow, clothes, and hair with
its different colors as non-skin color. Table 5 shows the skin
detection performance on Pratheepan; it compares the meth-
ods by accuracy, precision, recall, and the F-measure, where
it can be seen that the proposed method has the best per-
formance. As seen in Fig. 9, results are obviously with high
correlation with the ground truth. The proposed approach
succeeds in detecting skin with a real-world scenario, multi-
ple people, and in a natural setting as shown in Fig. 9 (Fig.
10).
A novel approach for human skin detection using convolutional neural network

Fig. 8 Example of results of human skin detection with different methods on SFA dataset. a Original image, b skin detection with YCbCr, c skin
detection with HSV, d skin detection with HSCBCR, and e skin detection with the proposed approach

123
 K. B. Salah et al.

Fig. 9 Experimental results on Pratheepan dataset. a Original image, b skin detection with the proposed approach, c ground truth image, and d
skin map obtained with the proposed approach

123
A novel approach for human skin detection using convolutional neural network

Fig. 10 Loss and accuracy curves (training and validation)

Table 4 Performances of different skin detection methods on SFA fundamental objective of this study was to explore the poten-
dataset tial of CNN learning model for skin pixel classification. A
Accuracy Recall F-measure Mcc IOU comparison is carried out among the existing methods and
our approach. As exhibited in experiments, the proposed
YCbCr 0.8898 0.8700 0.9200 0.7655 0.6988
method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of
HSV 0.8597 0.8200 0.8900 0.7220 0.6488
recall, accuracy, precision, and F-measure in different con-
HSCbCr 0.8477 0.8000 0.8800 0.7060 0.6323
ditions: complex background, variation in the illumination
Ours 0.9239 0.9600 0.9500 0.8126 0.7601
level, and ethnicity. The comparison was performed using
The bold is used to identify which method exceeds in term of value in the SFA and Pratheepan datasets. We have trained the CNN
that metric with skin and non-skin patches from the SFA dataset instead
of whole-image based strategy. We found that this training
Table 5 Evaluation results on Pratheepan dataset
strategy finds skin color as well as its texture. Then, when we
Methods Accuracy Precision Recall F-measure integrate the trained model in the global algorithm for human
Bayesian [2] 0.8237 0.6881 0.8972 0.7788
skin detection, it was efficient in rejecting non-skin pixels in
FSD [25] 0.8255 0.8077 0.6851 0.7414
various situations.
LASD [26] 0.8361 0.7954 0.8275 0.8111
FPSD [27] 0.8419 0.7387 0.8991 0.8070 Declarations
DSPF [28] 0.8521 0.7543 0.8436 0.7964
Conflict of interest The authors declared that they have no conflicts of
SPSD [29] 0.8782 0.7659 0.9328 0.8412
interest to this work.
Patch-VGG [30] 0.9299 0.8563 0.8750 0.8655
Patch-NiN [30] 0.9334 0.8802 0.8972 0.8886
Image-VGG [30] 0.9313 0.8577 0.9069 0.8816
Image-NiN [30] 0.9484 0.9003 0.8912 0.8957 References
FCNN [24] 0.9499 0.8480 0.8981 0.8678
1. Chen, W., Wang, K., Jiang, H., et al.: Skin color modeling for
Ours 0.9357 0.9801 0.9730 0.9765
face detection and segmentation: a review and a new approach.
The bold is used to identify which method exceeds in term of value in Multimed. Tools Appl. 75, 839–862 (2016)
that metric 2. Jones, M.J., Rehg, J.M.: Statistical color models with application
to skin detection. Int. J. Comput. Vis. 46, 81–96 (2002). https://
doi.org/10.1023/A:1013200319198
5 Conclusion 3. Zafarifar, B., Bellers, E.B., de With P.H.: Application and eval-
uation of texture-adaptive skin detection in TV image enhance-
ment. In: IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics
In this work, a novel approach based on convolutional neu- (ICCE), pp. 88–91 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCE.2013.
ral networks for human skin detection is presented. The 6486807

123

4. Rautaray, S.S., Agrawal, A.: Vision based hand gesture recognition
for human computer interaction: a survey. Artif. Intell. Rev. 43, 1–
54 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-012-9356-9
5. Zhang, Z., Gunes, H., Piccardi, M.: Head detection for video
surveillance based on categorical hair and skin colour models. In:
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, pp. 1137–
1140 (2009)
6. Schaefer, G., Tait, R., Zhu, S.Y.: Overlay of thermal and visual
medical images using skin detection and image registration. In:
International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and
Biology Society, NY, vol. 2, pp. 965–967 (2006). https://doi.org/
10.1109/IEMBS.2006.259275
7. Devi, M.S., Bajaj, P.R.: Driver fatigue detection based on eye
tracking. In: First International Conference on Emerging Trends
in Engineering and Technology, pp. 649–652 (2008). https://doi.
org/10.1109/ICETET.2008.17
8. Fang, R., Pouyanfar, S., Yang, Y., Chen, S.-C., Iyengar, S.: Com-
putational health informatics in the bigdata age: a survey. ACM
Comput. Surv. 49, 12 (2016)
9. Erdem, C.E., Ulukaya, S., Karaali, A., Erdem, A.T.: Combining
Haar feature and skin color based classifiers for face detection. In:
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal
Processing Proceedings, pp. 1497–1500 (2011)
10. Zhu, Q., Cheng, K.T., Wu, C.T., Wu, Y.L.: Adaptive learning of an
accurate skin-color model. In: IEEE International Conference on
Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, pp. 37–42 (2004)
11. Al-Tairi, Z., Wirza, R., Saripan, M.I., Sulaiman, P.: Skin segmen-
tation using YUV and RGB color spaces. J. Inf. Process. Syst. 10,
283–299 (2014)
12. Rahman, M.A., Edy Purnama, I.K., Purnomo, M.H.: Simple
method of human skin detection using HSV and YCbCr color
spaces. In: International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous
Agents, Networks and Systems, pp. 58–61 (2015)
13. Bin Abdul Rahman, N.A., Wei, K.C., See, J.: RGB-HCbCr skin
colour model for human face detection. In: Proceedings of The
MMU International Symposium on Information and Communica-
tions Technologies, pp. 90–96 (2006)
14. Hajiarbabi, M., Agah, A.: Face detection in color images using skin
segmentation. J. Autom. Mob. Robot. Intell. Syst. 8, 41–51 (2014)
15. Li, Y., Wang, Z., Yang, X., et al.: Efficient convolutional hierar-
chical autoencoder for human motion prediction. Vis. Comput. 35,
1143–1156 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-019-01692-9
16. Ganesan, P., Rajini, V.: YIQ color space based satellite image
segmentation using modified FCM clustering and histogram equal-
ization. In: Advances in Electrical Engineering (ICAEE), pp. 9–11
(2014)
17. Ganesan, P., Rajini, V.: Assessment of satellite image segmentation
in RGB and HSV color space using image quality measures. In:
Advances in Electrical Engineering (ICAEE), pp. 9–11 (2014)
18. Ganesan, P., Rajini, V.: Value based semi automatic segmentation of
satellite images using HSV color space, histogram equalization and
modified FCM clustering algorithm. In: Green Computing. Com-
munication and Conservation of Energy (ICGCE), p. 77 (2013)
19. Nikolskaia, K., Ezhova, N., Sinkov, A., Medvedev, M.: Skin detec-
tion technique based on HSV color model and SLIC segmentation
method. In: CEUR Workshop Proceedings, pp. 1323–1355 (2018)
20. Kakumanu, P., Makrogiannis, S., Bourbakis, N.: A survey of skin-
color modeling and detection methods. Pattern Recognit. (2007).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2006.06.010
21. Sack, H., Meinel, C.: Digitale Kommunikation: Vernetzen, Multi-
media, Sicherheit. Springer, Berlin (2009)
123
K. B. Salah et al.
22. Chai, D., Ngan, K.N.: Face segmentation using skin-color map in
videophone applications. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Tech-
nol. 9(4), 551–564 (1999)
23. Chitra, S., Balakrishnan, G.: Comparative study for two color
spaces HSCbCr and YCbCr in skin color detection. Appl. Math.
Sci. 6, 4229–4238 (2012)
24. Ma, C., Shih, H.: Human skin segmentation using fully convo-
lutional neural networks. Nara (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/
GCCE.2018.8574747
25. Tan, W.R., Chan, C.S., Yogarajah, P., Condell, J.: A fusion approach
for efficient human skin detection. IEEE Trans. Ind. Inform. 8, 138–
147 (2012)
26. Hwang, I., Lee, S.H., Min, B., Cho, N.I.: Luminance adapted skin
color modeling for the robust detection of skin areas. In: Proceed-
ings of IEEE ICIP, pp. 2622–2625 (2013)
27. Kawulok, M.: Fast propagation based skin regions segmentation in
color images. In: Proceedings of IEEEFG, pp. 1–7 (2013)
28. Kawulok, M., Kawulok, J., Nalepa, J.: Spatial based skin detection
using discriminative skin presence features. Pattern Recognit. Lett.
41, 3–13 (2014)
29. Hwang, I., Kim, Y., Cho, N.I.: Skin detection based on multi-seed
propagation in a multi-layer graph for regional and color consis-
tency. In: IEEE ICASSP (2017). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP.
2017.7952361
30. Kim, Y., Hwang, I., Cho, N.I.: Convolutional neural networks and
training strategies for skin detection. In: IEEE ICIP (2017). https://
doi.org/10.1109/ICIP.2017.8297017
31. Lecun, Y., Bengio, Y., Hinton, G.: Deep learning. Nature
521(7553), 436–444 (2015)
32. Ahmad, J., Muhammad, K., Bakshi, S., Baik, S.W.: Object-oriented
convolutional features for fine-grained image retrieval in large
surveillance datasets. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 81, 314–330
(2018)
33. Mudassar, R., Muhammad, S., Mussarat, Y., Attique, K.M.,
Tanzila, S., Lawrence, F.S.: Appearance based pedestrians’ gender
recognition by employing stacked auto encoders in deep learning.
Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 88, 28–39 (2018)
34. Hong, T.J., Bhandary, S.V., Sobha, S., Yuki, H., Akanksha, B.,
Raghavendra, U., et al.: Age-related macular degeneration detec-
tion using deep convolutional neural network. Future Gener.
Comput. Syst. 87, 127–135 (2018)
35. Srivastava, N., Hinton, G., Krizhevsky, A., Sutskever, I., Salakhut-
dinov, R.: Dropout: a simple way to prevent neural networks from
overfitting. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 15, 1929–1958 (2014)
36. Casati, J.P.B., Moraes, D.R., Rodrigues, E.L.L.: SFA: a human
skin image database based on FERET and AR facial images. In:
IX Workshop de Visao Computational, Rio de Janeiro (2013)
37. Yogarajah, P., Condell, J., Curran, K., Cheddad, A., McKevitt, P.: A
dynamic threshold approach for skin segmentation in color images.
In: Proceedings of IEEE ICIP, pp. 2225–2228 (2010)
Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to juris-
dictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
A novel approach for human skin detection using convolutional neural network
Khawla Ben Salah is a PhD
student at the National Engineer-
ing School of Sfax and received
the Ing. Diploma degree in 2014
from University of Manouba
(ISAMM). Her research interests
are computer vision, deep learn-
ing and machine learning.
Mohamed Othmani received B.Sc.
degree in computer science engi-
neering from the National School
of Engineering, University of Sfax,
Tunisia, M.S and PhD degrees
in computer systems engineering
from the National School of Engi-
neering, University of Sfax,
Tunisia. His research
interests include computer vision
and image analysis. His research
activities are centered on deep
learning, image and signal pro-
cessing, 3D object modeling, clas-
sification and recognition, theory
and tools of neural networks. He is a member of the Research Group
on Intelligent Machines (REGIM). He is teaching computer Science at
the Faculty of Sciences, University of Gafsa, Tunisia.
Monji Kherallah was born in
Sfax, Tunisia. He received Ing.
Diploma degree, Ph.D. and HU
in electrical engineering, respec-
tively, in 1989, 2008 and 2012,
from University of Sfax (ENIS).
For fourteen years, he was an engi-
neer in Biotechnology Center of
Sfax. Now he is Professor in Fac-
ulty of Science of Sfax. He is
founder of a professional mas-
ters degree ”Metrology and Indus-
trial Instrumentation” at the Fac-
ulty of Sciences of Sfax. His
research interest includes signal
and image processing. The techniques used are based on intelligent
methods, such as neural network, logic fuzzy, genetic algorithm, etc.
In fact his research work is based on machine learning and deep learn-
ing. The applications are focused on Arabic document analysis and
recognition, biometrics, robotics, etc. He has more than 100 papers,
including journal and conference papers and book chapters. His con-
tribution also includes some international project as DAAD project
from April 2007 to March 2010 and EOLES Erasmus + project from
September 2012 to 2015. His teaching skills are around these themes:
Analog Electronics, Digital Electronics, Power Electronics, Industrial
Maintenance, Sensors and Instrumentation, Pattern Recognition, Arti-
ficial Intelligence. He is a member of IEEE and IEEE AESS Tunisia
Chapter Chair, 2010 and 2011. He is reviewer of several international
journals.
123