Efficient and Low Color Information Dependency Skin Segmentation Model

Skin segmentation involves segmenting the human skin region in an image. It is a preprocessing technique mainly used in many applications such as face detection, hand gesture recognition, and remote biosignal measurements. As the performance of skin segmentation directly affects the performance of these applications, precise skin segmentation methods have been studied. However, previous skin segmentation methods are unsuitable for real-world environments because they rely heavily on color information. In addition, deep-learning-based skin segmentation methods incur high computational costs, even though skin segmentation is mainly used for preprocessing. This study proposes a lightweight skin segmentation model with a high performance. Additionally, we used data augmentation techniques that modify the hue, saturation, and values, allowing the model to learn texture or contextual information better without relying on color information. Our proposed model requires 1.09M parameters and 5.04 giga multiply-accumulate. Through experiments, we demonstrated that our proposed model shows high performance with an F-score of 0.9492 and consistent performance even for modified images. Furthermore, our proposed model showed a fast processing speed of approximately 68 fps, based on 3 × 512 × 512 images and an NVIDIA RTX 2080TI GPU (11GB VRAM) graphics card.