Selective skin tone reproduction using preferred skin colors

People in a color image, particularly facial patterns are important and interesting visual object. Thus, color reproduction for skin tone becomes the foremost treatment, because skin color is a key memory color in color application systems. 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, selective skin color reproduction using preferred skin colors is proposed. The proposed method first defines preferred skin colors according to their luminance level. Next skin color is detected by using skin and feature map. After that, each corresponding preferred skin color is determined for each skin region. 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.