Lip Segmentation Based on Facial Complexion Template

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), lip diagnosis is an important diagnostic method to judge whether a person is healthy or not. Lip images can reflect the physical conditions of organs in the body. Lip diagnosis has a long history in China and the lips are analyzed by experienced doctors with their nude eyes. This method is not objective and efficient especially in the condition of handling many images. Developing an automatic way to split lips from an image is an important and necessary step. What’s more, lip segmentation can provide improvement in the areas of speech recognition and speaker authentication. To segment lips and facial complexions, many methods are proposed which are based on color spaces such as RGB, HSV, Lab, etc. Other methods are based on different models such as snake, geometry model, etc. This paper proposes a lip segmentation method based on facial complexion template. A facial complexion template can be constructed when the face is detected. We construct the facial complexion template using Hue channel and Saturation channel of color information. By removing the skin similar to facial complexion template values an initial lip image can be got. Finally, by smoothing the lip contour an optimized lip segmentation result can be obtained.