Decision Level Fusion of Colour Histogram Based Classifiers for Clustering of Mouth Area Images

Abstract

It is well known that in many situations combining diverse classifiers can improve the performance of a classification system. In this paper, a new histogram based lip segmentation technique is proposed considering local kernel histograms in different illumination invariant colour spaces. The histogram is computed in local areas using two Gaussian kernels; one in the colour space and the other in the spatial domain. Using the estimated histogram, the posterior probability associated to non-lip class is then computed for each pixel. This process is performed considering different colour spaces. A weighted averaging method is then used for fusing the posterior probability values. As the result a new score is obtained which is used for labeling the pixels as lip or non-lip. The advantage of the proposed method is that the segmentation process is totally unsupervised. So, the method is robust against different variations such as variation in lip shape, skin colour, facial hair, illumination, etc. Moreover, an improved performance is achieved by fusing colour information.