Automatic Segmentation of Hair in Images

Based on a multi-step process, an automatic hair segmentation method is created and tested on a database of 115 manually segmented hair images. By extracting various information components from an image, including background color, face position, hair color, skin color, and skin mask, a heuristic-based method is created for the detection and segmentation of hair that can detect hair with an accuracy of approximately 75% and with a false hair overestimation error of 34%. Furthermore, it is shown that downsampling the image down to a face width of 25px results in a 73% reduction in computation time with insignificant change in detection accuracy.