Contextual and skin color region information for face and arms location

Interest in intelligent human-computer interfaces has grown in recent years due to the possibilities that they offer. To these systems, two of the most important sources of interaction are the face and the arms gestures. Different face detection approaches have been made up to date, while arms detection is still a challenging task. This paper describes a methodology for the location of faces and arms in color images combining color information with region information and domain knowledge information. The obtained method is able to work very accurately regardless of races and skin colors, poses, resolutions, lighting conditions, and so on. It has been tested with a representative range of different arm positions, achieving encouraging results.