Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets

Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann

Review of Face Detection Systems Based Artificial Neural Networks Algorithms

Face detection is one of the most relevant applications of image processing and biometric systems. Artificial neural networks (ANN) have been used in the field of image processing and pattern recognition. There is lack of literature surveys which give overview about the studies and researches related to the using of ANN in face detection. Therefore, this research includes a general review of face detection studies and systems which based on different ANN approaches and algorithms. The strengths and limitations of these literature studies and systems were included also.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 1 table, IJMA Journa

Learning Grimaces by Watching TV

Differently from computer vision systems which require explicit supervision, humans can learn facial expressions by observing people in their environment. In this paper, we look at how similar capabilities could be developed in machine vision. As a starting point, we consider the problem of relating facial expressions to objectively measurable events occurring in videos. In particular, we consider a gameshow in which contestants play to win significant sums of money. We extract events affecting the game and corresponding facial expressions objectively and automatically from the videos, obtaining large quantities of labelled data for our study. We also develop, using benchmarks such as FER and SFEW 2.0, state-of-the-art deep neural networks for facial expression recognition, showing that pre-training on face verification data can be highly beneficial for this task. Then, we extend these models to use facial expressions to predict events in videos and learn nameable expressions from them. The dataset and emotion recognition models are available at http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/facevalueComment: British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 201