Automatic Tongue Feature Extraction

Abstract

Tongue diagnosis is crucial to the inspection diagnosis in Chinese Medicine. Clinically, doctors mostly rely on their own knowledge and experience when determining major lesions of a patient by observing the coloration, overall modalities, and volume of sputum of different parts of the tongue. The subjective determination is likely to be affected by the doctor’s color sensitivity and interpretation. Therefore, it is important to develop scientific methods that can help doctors diagnose based on standardized differentiation procedures and render reliable diagnoses in order to enhance the clinical application value of Chinese Medicine. The computerized automatic capture of characteristics shown on the images of the surface comprises breakup of the tongue image and capture of the tongue characteristics.