J Inf Process Syst, Vol.10, No.2, pp.283~299, June 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.3745/JIPS.02.0002 283 Skin Segmentation Using YUV and RGB Color Spaces Zaher Hamid Al-Tairi*, Rahmita Wirza Rahmat*, M. Iqbal Saripan*, and Puteri Suhaiza Sulaiman* Abstract—Skin detection is used in many applications, such as face recognition, hand tracking, and human-computer interaction. There are many skin color detection algorithms that are used to extract human skin color regions that are based on the thresholding technique since it is simple and fast for computation. The efficiency of each color space depends on its robustness to the change in lighting and the ability to distinguish skin color pixels in images that have a complex background. For more accurate skin detection, we are proposing a new threshold based on RGB and YUV color spaces. The proposed approach starts by converting the RGB color space to the YUV color model. Then it separates the Y channel, which represents the intensity of the color model from the U and V channels to eliminate the effects of luminance. After that the threshold values are selected based on the testing of the boundary of skin colors with the help of the color histogram. Finally, the threshold was applied to the input image to extract skin parts. The detected skin regions were quantitatively compared to the actual skin parts in the input images to measure the accuracy and to compare the results of our threshold to the results of other's thresholds to prove the efficiency of our approach. The results of the experiment show that the proposed threshold is more robust in terms of dealing with the complex background and light conditions than others. Keywords—Skin Segmentation, Thresholding Technique, Skin Detection, Color Space 1. INTRODUCTION Skin detection is an interesting and challenging topic for many researchers as it is used in many applications such as, hand and face tracking, sign language recognition, human-computer interaction, and others. The difficulty of skin detection is due to the variation of people’s race where each race has a different skin tone from the others. The difference in people’s skin is not the only problem as there other factors such as the light conditions where the variation in luminance limits the accuracy of skin segmentation. There are many skin color spaces like RGB, HSV, YCbCr, YIQ, YUV, etc. that are used for skin color segmentation. The RGB color model represents the colors that are in the red, green, and blue planes and does not separate the luminance from the chrominance components, which makes it a poor choice for color analysis and color based recognition [1]. The conversion from RGB color space to the HSV color model is time consuming due to the time it takes to do a non- linear transmission [2]. To overcome the previous problems, we have proposed a new threshold, Manuscript received April 17, 2013; first revision September 24, 2013; accepted November 28, 2013. Corresponding Author: Zaher Hamid Al-Tairi (zaher_tu@yahoo.com) * University Putra Malaysia (UPM), Selangor, Malaysia ({zaher_tu, zaher78hamid, breave78heart, husam- zah}@yahoo.com) pISSN 1976-913X eISSN 2092-805X Copyright ⓒ 2014 KIPS