Segmentation of skin colour under different illuminations and estimation of the colour of illuminations / Segmentering af hudfarve under forskellige lyskilder og estimering af lyskilders farve

Automatically detecting and tracking faces and hands of humans in motion is important in applications such as interfaces for human computer interaction (HCI), in- and outdoor surveillance, and automatic camera men. An often-used feature in face and human motion tracking is skin colour because it is fast to compute and invariant to size and orientation. However, the colour of skin changes as the illumination changes. This project aims to develop adaptive methods for segmenting human skin under changing illumination conditions. A physics based reflection model of human skin has been developed, and successfully applied, e.g., to estimate the illumination colour and adapt statistical models for skin colour, respectively. Furthermore, colour information has been combined with near infrared information in order to improve the skin detection robustness. In 2004 Moritz Stoerring received a Ph.D. within this topic on ?Computer Vision and Human Skin Colour?. (Moritz Störring, Erik Granum, Hans J. Andersen)