Adaptive skin color modeling using the skin locus for selecting training pixels

Techniques for color-based tracking of faces or hands often assume a static skin model yet skin color, as measured by a camera, can change when lighting changes. Therefore, for robust skin pixel detection, an adaptive skin color model must be employed. We demonstrate a chromaticity-based constraint to select training pixels in a scene for updating a dynamic skin color model under changing illumination conditions. The method makes use of the ‘skin locus’ of a camera, that is, the area in chromaticity space where skin chromaticity under various lighting and camera calibration conditions is observed. Skin color models derived from the technique are compared with that derived by a common spatial constraint and is shown to be more consistent with manually extracted ground truth skin model per frame even as localization errors increase. The technique is applied to color-based face tracking in indoor and outdoor videos and is shown to succeed more often than other color model adaptation techniques.