Journal of Biomedical Engineering 2005;22(6):1116-1120

Tongue image color recognition in traditional Chinese medicine.

Yonggang WANG 1 ; Jie YANG ; Yue ZHOU ; Yiqin WANG

Affiliations

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Country

China

Language

Chinese

Abstract

The problem of color recognition of substances and coats in tongue images was decomposed into two steps, i. e. region separation and color recognition. In the first step, a new method based on the JSEG and the k-NN algorithms was proposed to separate coats and substances, where a prior template and some standard color patches were designed to assist the classification. Color recognition in a fine scale was carried out by the nearest neighbour method on the basis of the first step. The experiments showed the method proposed in this paper was simple and highly robust, and can be applied to tongue characterization effectively. In addition, the two important preprocessing algorithms namely color calibration and segmentation of tongue images were improved to obtain better results than the former.