Journal of Biomedical Engineering 2005;22(6):1128-1133

Image segmentation in tongue characterization.

Yuzhong WANG 1 ; Jie YANG ; Yue ZHOU ; Yuanjie ZHENG ; Yiqin WANG

Affiliations

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Country

China

Language

Chinese

Abstract

Tongue diagnosis is one of the essential methods of traditional Chinese medical diagnosis. The accuracy of tongue diagnosis can be improved by tongue characterization. Tongue area segmentation and homogeneous regions segmentation in tongue are important contents of preprocess of tongue image. An algorithm based on edge detection and Gradient vector flow (GVF) active contour for tongue area segmentation and another algorithm based on unsupervised segmentation of color-texture for homogeneous regions segmentation in tongue were presented. Totally about 1500 tongue images were collected. Results of tongue area segmentation achieved accuracy rate of 94.3% and results of homogeneous regions segmentation in tongue were approved by traditional Chinese medical experts. The experiments results show robustness of the algorithms. This work establishes solid foundation for feature selecting of Tongue diagnosis.