Implementation of the watershed method in the HSI color space for the face extraction

The color segmentation is an important preprocessing step in the face detection methods. In this paper we present effective face color segmentation in the HSI (Hue, saturation and intensity) space. We propose to modify the merging algorithm of the catchment basins obtained by the watershed segmentation method by adding a criterion based on the relevance of the Hue component. The obtained experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.