1. A system of facial area image detection employing skin tones comprising: an input operable to receive image data comprised of a plurality of pixels encoded in at least a three dimensional component space; an image sampler operable to generate sub-sampled image data from the received image data; a pixel calculator operable to calculate a percentage of pixels in the generated sub-sampled image data having an associated chroma value less than a predetermined threshold value; a comparator operable to compare the calculated percentage of pixels against a predetermined percentage threshold value; a skin tone classifier operable to classify each pixel in the sub-sample image data in accordance with an associated skin tone model; a processor operable to generate skin tone map data in accordance with an output of the skin tone classifier; and an output of skin tone mask data in accordance with the generated skin tone map data.