Law enforcement is interested in exploiting tattoos as an information source to identify, track and prevent gang-related crimes. Many tattoo image retrieval systems have been described. In a retrieval system tattoo segmentation is an important step for retrieval accuracy since segmentation removes background information in a tattoo image. Existing segmentation methods do not extract the tattoo very well when the background includes textures and color similar to skin tones. In this paper we describe a tattoo segmentation approach by determining skin pixels in regions near the tattoo. In these regions graph-cut segmentation using a skin color model and a visual saliency map is used to find skin pixels. After segmentation we determine which set of skin pixels are connected with each other that form a closed contour including a tattoo. The regions surrounded by the closed contours are considered tattoo regions. Our method segments tattoos well when the background includes textures and color similar to skin.

Date Published: 4 March 2015
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9410, Visual Information Processing and Communication VI, 94100H (4 March 2015);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9410:
Visual Information Processing and Communication VI
Amir Said; Onur G. Guleryuz; Robert L. Stevenson, Editor(s)