A New Pseudo-automatic Outer Lip Contour Extraction Approach Based on RGB Components

Detection and tracking of the lip contour is an important issue in speech reading. While there are solutions for lip tracking once a good contour initialization in the first frame is available, the problem of finding such a good initialization is not yet solved automatically, but done manually. Solutions based on edge detection and tracking have failed when applied on real world mouth images. In this paper we propose a solution to the lip contour detection that minimizes the user interaction. A minimal number of points to be manually marked on the mouth image are required initially as reference points. The method is based on the examination of values of the RGB components of the outer surface of the region enclosed by the outer lip contour. The paper also includes the limitations of the other existing approaches