An unsupervised color image segmentation algorithm for face detection applications

This paper presents an unsupervised color segmentation technique to divide skin detected pixels into a set of homogeneous regions which can be used in face detection applications or any other application which may require color segmentation. The algorithm is carried out in a two stage processing, where the chrominance and luminance informations are used consecutively. For each stage a novel algorithm which combines pixel and region based color segmentation techniques is used. The algorithm has proven to be effective under a large number of test images.