Face Extraction via YCbCr Skin Region Detection and Morphological Processing

This M-file implements frontal face extraction through skin region detection in YCbCr color space and morphological processing. The algorithm first converts the input image to YCbCr color space and applies empirically determined threshold ranges for Cb (77-127) and Cr (133-173) components to identify skin-toned regions. The resulting binary mask undergoes morphological operations including erosion to remove noise and small artifacts, followed by dilation to reconstruct and enhance the face region contours. Key functions utilized include rgb2ycbcr for color space conversion, imerode for erosion, and imdilate for dilation operations. This processing pipeline effectively handles facial images with varying skin tones and lighting conditions. The extracted face regions can be directly applied to computer vision tasks such as face detection systems, facial recognition algorithms, and emotion analysis applications, making it particularly valuable for biometric security and human-computer interaction systems.