Estimation and Prediction of Evolving Color Distributions for Skin Segmentation Under Varying Illumination
Date
1999-12-01
DOI
Authors
Sigal, Leonid
Sclaroff, Stan
Athitsos, Vassilis
Version
OA Version
Citation
Sigal, Leonid; Sclaroff, Stan. "Estimation and Prediction of Evolving Color Distributions for Skin Segmentation Under Varying Illumination", Technical Report BUCS-1999-015, Computer Science Department, Boston University, December 1, 1999. [Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2144/1792]
Abstract
A novel approach for real-time skin segmentation in video sequences is described. The approach enables reliable skin segmentation despite wide variation in illumination during tracking. An explicit second order Markov model is used to predict evolution of the skin color (HSV) histogram over time. Histograms are dynamically updated based on feedback from the current segmentation and based on predictions of the Markov model. The evolution of the skin color distribution at each frame is parameterized by translation, scaling and rotation in color space. Consequent changes in geometric parameterization of the distribution are propagated by warping and re-sampling the histogram. The parameters of the discrete-time dynamic Markov model are estimated using Maximum Likelihood Estimation, and also evolve over time. Quantitative evaluation of the method was conducted on labeled ground-truth video sequences taken from popular movies.