Performance Evaluation of Single and Multiple-Gaussian Models for Skin Color Modeling

• Authors: Tiberio S. Caetano;Silvia D. Olabarriaga;Dante Augusto Couto Barone
• Venue: SIBGRAPI '02 Proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing
• Year: 2002

We present an experimental setup to evaluate the relative peiformance of single gaussian and mixture of gaussians models for skin color modeling. Firstly, a sample set of J, J 20, 000 skin pixels from a number of ethnic groups is selected and represented in the chromaticity space. In the following, parameter estimation for both the single gaussian and seven (with 2 to 8 gaussian components) gaussian mixture models is peiformed. For the mixture models, learningis carried out via the expectation-maximisation (EM) algorithm. In order to compare performances achieved by the 8 different models, we apply to each model a test set of 800images -none from the training set. 1rue skin regions, representing the ground truth, are manually selected, and false positive and true positive rates are computed for each value of a specific threshold. Finally, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves are plotted for each model, which make it possible to analyze and compare their relative performances. Results obtained show that, for medium to high true positive rates, mixture models (with 2 to 8 components) outperform the single gaussian model. Nevertheless. for low false positive rates, all the models behave similarly.