Human skin in a color image is important and interesting visual object. since skin color is a key memory color in color application systems color reproduction for skin tone. Previous studies suggested skin color reproduction by mapping only to the center value of preferred skin region. However, it is not suitable to determine one preference color because preference color from the observer's preference test is not dominant. In this paper, skin color reproduction using multiple preferred skin colors for each race is proposed. The proposed method first defines multiple preferred skin colors for each race according to their luminance level. Then, the race is selected by calculating distance between average chromaticity of detected region and that of each racial skin from the database to assign preferred skin color for each race. Next, one of multiple preferred skin colors is selected for each selected race. Finally, input skin color is proportionally mapped toward preferred skin color according to the difference between input skin color and preferred skin color, smoothly reproducing skin color. Through the experimental results, the proposed method achieves preferred skin color reproduction for each race in an image including single race and races.
Dae-Chul Kim, Wang-Jun Kyung, Yeong-Ho Ha, "Selective Skin Tone Reproduction based on Multiple Preferred Skin Colors" in Proc. IS&T 20th Color and Imaging Conf., 2012, pp 149 - 154, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.2012.20.1.art00026