AUTOMATIC SEGMENTATION OF HAIR IN IMAGES

Based on a multi-step process, an automatic hair segmentation method and system are disclosed. By extracting various information components from an image, including background color, face position, hair color, skin color, and skin mask, a heuristic-based method is created for the detection and segmentation of hair that can detect hair with an accuracy of approximately 75% and with a false hair overestimation error of 34%. Furthermore, it is shown that down sampling the image down to a face width of 25 px results in a 73% reduction in computation time with insignificant change in detection accuracy.