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

Mingfeng Zhu,Chenghua Ding,Jianqiang Du

doi:10.1155/2014/534507

Mingfeng Zhu, Chenghua Ding + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/534507

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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.

Highlights

Tongue diagnosis is one of the important contents of “Four Diagnoses” in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)
In order to describe the accuracy of our method with fusion of color and space information, we implemented 4 typical kinds of color tongue image extraction methods and compared the results of manual segmentations with the results of these 4 methods
These 4 color tongue image extraction methods are geodesic active contour mentioned in [1], the method based on mathematical morphology and HSI color model mentioned in [21], the method based on sequential algorithm and HSI color model mentioned in [22], and our method with fusion of color and space information suggested in a recent China invention patent

Summary

Introduction

Tongue diagnosis is one of the important contents of “Four Diagnoses” in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Li et al [10] proposed a novel method for tongue contour extraction based on improved level set curve evolution, in which an automatic initialization of contour was presented and both the color information and tongue contour shape were used to segment tongue images. Applying this method to the large database of tongue images, promising experimental results were achieved. 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. We will discuss HSI color model and the principle of tongue image extraction in HSI color model as well as compare the typical method [21], method [22], and Snakes method with our recent tongue image extraction method suggested in a new China invention patent

Materials and Methods

Results and Discussion

Method