Automation human skin segmentation based on color information in the YCbCr color space

We present an automatic human skin segmentation algorithm based on color information. The YCbCr color space is employed because it is typically used in video coding and provides an effective use of chrominance information for modeling the human skin color. We model the skin-color distribution as a bivariate normal distribution in the CbCr plane and classify each pixel as skin or non-skin based on its Mahalanobis distance. The performance of the algorithm is illustrated by simulations carried out on images depicting people of different ethnicity.Habili, N. ; Cheng-Chew Lim ; Moini, A