Skin detection using the EM algorithm with spatial constraints

In this paper, we propose a color-based method for skin detection and segmentation, which also takes into account the spatial coherence of the skin pixels. We treat the problem of skin detection as an inference problem. We assume that each pixel in an image has a hidden binary label associated with it, that specifies if it is skin or not. In order to solve the inference problem, we use a variational EM algorithm, which incorporates the spatial constraints with just a small computational overhead in the E-step. Finally, we show that our method provides better results than the standard EM algorithm and a state-of-art skin-detection method from the literature of Jones, M. J. and Rehg, J. M. (2002).