TY - JOUR T1 - Class Separation Improvements in Pixel Classification Using Colour Injection JF - Sensors Y1 - 2010 A1 - Edward Blanco A1 - Manuel Mazo A1 - Luis Miguel Bergasa A1 - Sira E. Palazuelos A1 - J. M. Rodríguez-Ascariz A1 - Cristina Losada-Gutiérrez A1 - Jose Luis Martin KW - class separation KW - colour clustering KW - colour injection KW - colour segmentation KW - colour sub-spaces KW - Pixel classification AB - This paper presents an improvement in the colour image segmentation in the Hue Saturation (HS) sub-space. The authors propose to inject (add) a colour vector in the Red Green Blue (RGB) space to increase the class separation in the HS plane. The goal of the work is the development of an algorithm to obtain the optimal colour vector for injection that maximizes the separation between the classes in the HS plane. The chromatic Chrominace-1 Chrominance-2 sub-space (of the Luminance Chrominace-1 Chrominance-2 (YC1C2) space) is used to obtain the optimal vector to add. The proposal is applied on each frame of a colour image sequence in real-time. It has been tested in applications with reduced contrast between the colours of the background and the object, and particularly when the size of the object is very small in comparison with the size of the captured scene. Numerous tests have confirmed that this proposal improves the segmentation process, considerably reducing the effects of the variation of the light intensity of the scene. Several tests have been made in skin segmentation in applications for sign language recognition via computer vision, where an accurate segmentation of hands and face is required. CY - Basel, Suiza VL - 10(8) UR - http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/10/8/7803/pdf IS - Intelligent Sensors - 2010 ER -