This paper is concerned with estimating a probability density function of human skin color using a finite Gaussian mixture model whose parameters are estimated through the EM algorithm. Hawkins' statistical test on the normality and homoscedasticity (common covariance matrix) of the estimated Gaussian mixture models is performed and McLachlan's bootstrap method is used to test the number of components in a mixture. Experimental results show that the estimated Gaussian mixture model fits skin images from a large database. Applications of the estimated density function in image and video databases are presented.
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