A Comprehensive Survey on Human Skin Detection

Human Skin detection is one of the most widely used algorithms in vision literature which has been numerously exploited both directly and indirectly in multifarious applications. This scope has received a great deal of attention specifically in face analysis and human detection/tracking/recognition systems. As regards, there are several challenges mainly emanating from nonlinear illumination, camera characteristics, imaging conditions, and intra-personal features. During last twenty years, researchers have been struggling to overcome these challenges resulting in publishing hundreds of papers. The aim of this paper is to survey applications, color spaces, methods and their performances, compensation techniques and benchmarking datasets on human skin detection topic, covering the related researches within more than last two decades. In this paper, different difficulties and challenges involved in the task of finding skin pixels are discussed. Skin segmentation algorithms are mainly based on color information; an in-depth discussion on effectiveness of disparate color spaces is elucidated. In addition, using standard evaluation metrics and datasets make the comparison of methods both possible and reasonable. These databases and metrics are investigated and suggested for future studies. Reviewing most existing techniques not only will ease future studies, but it will also result in developing better methods. These methods are classified and illustrated in detail. Variety of applications in which skin detection has been either fully or partially used is also provided.