Human colour skin detection in CMYK colour space

Fast detection of skin colour in images is an important task for computer vision and image processing. In this study, a new thresholding method for detecting skin colour has been introduced. The proposed method uses CMYK colour space, which, although not popular in image processing, especially in skin detecting algorithm, turned out to be a good choice. Its properties seem the most appropriate for the task of skin colour detection. Some experiments have been worked out using Compaq Database - a large database of skin and non-skin photos. A comparison of the new method against well-known thresholding methods in RGB, YCbCr and HSV spaces were prepared. In this comparison, the proposed method in CMYK colour space wins. This good result was further improved using a simple cascade algorithm, where two spaces RGB and CMYK were used.