Domain adaptation for holistic skin detection
This work addresses dataset biases and lack of contextual information in skin detection for computer vision applications, presenting an incremental improvement through domain adaptation methods.
The paper tackled the problem of human skin detection in images by evaluating holistic and local CNN approaches against pixel-based methods, showing CNN superiority even without labeled target domain data and supporting the counter-intuitive advantage of holistic over local approaches.
Human skin detection in images is a widely studied topic of Computer Vision for which it is commonly accepted that analysis of pixel color or local patches may suffice. This is because skin regions appear to be relatively uniform and many argue that there is a small chromatic variation among different samples. However, we found that there are strong biases in the datasets commonly used to train or tune skin detection methods. Furthermore, the lack of contextual information may hinder the performance of local approaches. In this paper we present a comprehensive evaluation of holistic and local Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approaches on in-domain and cross-domain experiments and compare with state-of-the-art pixel-based approaches. We also propose a combination of inductive transfer learning and unsupervised domain adaptation methods, which are evaluated on different domains under several amounts of labelled data availability. We show a clear superiority of CNN over pixel-based approaches even without labelled training samples on the target domain. Furthermore, we provide experimental support for the counter-intuitive superiority of holistic over local approaches for human skin detection.