Automatic skin and hair masking using fully convolutional networks

Selfies have become commonplace. More and more people take pictures of themselves, and enjoy enhancing these pictures using a variety of image processing techniques. One specific functionality of interest is automatic skin and hair segmentation, as this allows for processing one's skin and hair separately. Traditional approaches require user input in the form of fully specified trimaps, or at least of “scribbles” indicating foreground and background areas, with high-quality masks then generated via matting. Manual input, however, can be difficult or tedious, especially on a smartphone's small screen. In this paper, we propose the use of fully convolutional networks (FCN) and fully-connected CRF to perform pixel-level semantic segmentation into skin, hair and background. The trimap thus generated is given as input to a standard matting algorithm, resulting in accurate skin and hair alpha masks. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the LFW Parts dataset [1]. The effectiveness of our method is also demonstrated with a specific application case.