An illumination invariant skin-color model for face detection

Face detection is an important step towards a fully automatic face recognition system. Among existing techniques in the literature, methods based on skin-color information have shown computational effectiveness as well as robustness in terms of rotation, scaling and partial occlusion. However, due to color variations resulted from illumination changes, many color-based techniques have yet to demonstrate a stable state of performance. In this paper, we present an illumination invariant color space model to address the color variation issue. The proposed method is evaluated both in terms of skin-color detection and face detection performances. Our empirical experiments evidenced both effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed method.