# Domain adaptation for holistic skin detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.06969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06969/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Weakly Supervised Human Skin Segmentation using Guidance Attention Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04625/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.