Skin segmentation is widely used in many computer vision tasks to improve automated visualization. This paper presents a graph cuts algorithm to segment arbitrary skin regions from images. The detected face is used to determine the foreground skin seeds and the background non-skin seeds with the color probability distributions for the foreground represented by a single Gaussian model and for the background by a Gaussian mixture model. The probability distribution of the image is used for noise suppression to alleviate the influence of the background regions having skin-like colors. Finally, the skin is segmented by graph cuts, with the regional parameter γ optimally selected to adapt to different images. Tests of the algorithm on many real world photographs show that the scheme accurately segments skin regions and is robust against illumination variations, individual skin variations, and cluttered backgrounds.

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for extracting key frames to represent video shots. Regarding whether, or how well, a key frame represents a shot, different interpretations have been suggested. We develop our algorithm on the assumption that more important content may demand more attention and may last relatively more frames. Unsupervised clustering is used to divide the frames into clusters within a shot, and then a key frame is selected from each candidate cluster. To make the algorithm independent of video sequences, we employ a statistical model to calculate the clustering threshold. The proposed algorithm can capture the important yet salient content as the key frame. Its robustness and adaptability are validated by experiments with various kinds of video sequences.