How do i filter only skin coloured pixels in an image?

I read in a paper that using HSV formats for skin extraction is the best, but I don't know how to extract only the skin colour. I need to extract only the skin colour as a part of my gesture recognition project.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

See my tutorial "Simple color detection by hue" in my File Exchange: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?term=authorid%3A31862 Note that since the 3D color gamut of skin is banana/boomerang-shaped, you can't get it perfect with just hsv thresholding. If there are some reddish gray pixels in there, you'd get those too, though I guess that would be perfect if you have photos of zombies.