An Optimized Semantic Segmentation Framework for Human Skin Detection

Abstract

The study incorporating optimization strategy in semantic segmentation is underexplored in dermatology. Existing approaches used complex and various heuristic designs of image processing algorithms and deep models customized for skin detection problems. This paper demonstrates Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-incorporated AlexNet framework for the skin segmentation task. The results from testing the trained model are promising. The model produced satisfactory performances even with a strict split of 50 %, confirming the high efficiency of the proposed framework. The mean Jaccard index and Dice similarity measures evaluated between the annotated and predicted mask ranged from 0.80 to 0.93 in the binary classification of pixels as “skin” versus “background”. This work identified that the location and color variability of skin pixels in the training data are crucial to obtaining a good skin segmentation performance. Further works that can be explored in this area include adopting a robust preprocessing strategy to increase data variability and improve model generalization or implementing an optimization-enhanced strategy on the existing segmentation models for comparison.