Skin detection using color processing mechanism inspired by the visual system

Skin detection is an important procedure for face detection, hand gesture analysis, and objectionable image filtering. In this paper, a skin detection algorithm is proposed according to the colour processing mechanism inspired by the visual system. In the algorithm different types of neurons are used to deal with skin colour and texture. Inspired by receptive fields of rod, cone and orientation selectivity neurons in the visual system, a neural network is proposed to identify skin area in an image. The network contains three types of cones, one type of rod and four types of orientation neurons. Three cones are in response to red, green and blue lights respectively. The rods are in response to brightness. Orientation neurons are used to detect textures of skin. Through their specific receptive fields, the network can be trained to identify skin areas. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is comparable to current skin segmentation algorithms.