A Novel Approach for Tongue Image Extraction Based on Combination of Color and Space Information

Abstract

Tongue inspection is one of the most important methods of Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnoses. Traditional tongue inspection mainly depends on observations to tongue substance, tongue coating and tongue pattern and diagnostic experience of the doctors. Diagnostic results are restricted by doctor's knowledge level, their experience as well as other subjective factors and affected by the light and temperature of external environment. In order to solve this problem, we should combine Traditional Chinese Medicine experts' diagnostic experience with modern information technologies, check and analyze tongues quantitively and objectively, and make scientific diagnoses. However, to realize quantitive and objective tongue checks and analyses, extracting tongue from the mouth and face is the first important step. A novel approach for tongue image extraction is proposed to solve this problem in this article. It utilizes greedy rules to combine color information and space information to search object tongue area in the 2-dimensional sample space, and the start position of the search, intensity threshold and hue threshold are selected fully automatically. Comparison experiment results indicate that this method can extract tongue from the raw image effectively and we have made a breakthrough in extracting the tongues with thick coating. Moreover, the tongue images extracted by this method can be used as valid bases for the later quantitive analyses.

A Comparative Study of Contemporary Color Tongue Image Extraction Methods Based on HSI

“…Zhu et al [ 12 ] introduced a novel approach for color tongue image extraction with fusion of color and space information, which was suggested in a recent authorized China invention patent. This method used multiobjective greedy rules and made fusion of color and space information to extract tongue image.…”

“…Other kinds of methods enriched the application of tongue image extraction. Zhu et al [ 12 ] suggested a kind of color tongue image extraction method which utilized greedy rules with fusion of color and space information in order to extract tongue body region from background accurately. The accuracy of this method was quite high.…”

“…In the methods [ 3 , 4 , 9 , 11 , 12 , 17 , 21 , 22 ] mentioned above, there were a common ground that they were using HSI color model to describe the features of tongue image. And HSI color model is closer to human vision and due to specificity of the application of tongue image extraction using HSI color model can achieve better segmentation results than other methods.…”

Advances in automated tongue diagnosis techniques

“…After successful separation of background from the raw image, the template was found to be effective even for thick tongue coating. It can be useful for the quantitative evaluation of tongue 52 . The hue and intensity were exploited by Jian-Qiang et al, 55 for tongue image segmentation which worked well for regular tongue surfaces, but not for the irregular ones.…”