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

Abstract

Tongue image with coating is of important clinical diagnostic meaning, but traditional tongue image extraction method is not competent for extraction of tongue image with thick coating. In this paper, a novel method is suggested, which applies multiobjective greedy rules and makes fusion of color and space information in order to extract tongue image accurately. A comparative study of several contemporary tongue image extraction methods is also made from the aspects of accuracy and efficiency. As the experimental results show, geodesic active contour is quite slow and not accurate, the other 3 methods achieve fairly good segmentation results except in the case of the tongue with thick coating, our method achieves ideal segmentation results whatever types of tongue images are, and efficiency of our method is acceptable for the application of quantitative check of tongue image.

Advances in automated tongue diagnosis techniques

“…Then they are transformed into other color spaces. Tongue image segmentation 30 , 50 Color correction 28 HSI Fusion of color and space information 51 , 52 Tongue image extraction 51 , 52 , 53 Morphology 54 , 55 HSV Color matching 27 , 56 Contour shape 56 Extraction core tongue colors 57 LAB Redness measurement 58 Color matching 56 , 59 , 60 Automatic tongue image segmentation 61 Guidance system 4 …”

“…HSI is closer to human vision. Zhu et al 51 favored HSI due to its specificity of the application in tongue image extraction. With the help of HSI color model, the greedy rules were utilized to develop the template.…”