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http://dx.doi.org/10.3837/tiis.2019.02.025

Tongue Image Segmentation via Thresholding and Gray Projection  

Liu, Weixia (Straits Institute, Minjiang University)
Hu, Jinmei (Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Processing and Intelligent Control, Minjiang University)
Li, Zuoyong (Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Processing and Intelligent Control, Minjiang University)
Zhang, Zuchang (Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Processing and Intelligent Control, Minjiang University)
Ma, Zhongli (College of Automation, Harbin Engineering University)
Zhang, Daoqiang (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics)
Publication Information
KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS) / v.13, no.2, 2019 , pp. 945-961 More about this Journal
Abstract
Tongue diagnosis is one of the most important diagnostic methods in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Tongue image segmentation aims to extract the image object (i.e., tongue body), which plays a key role in the process of manufacturing an automated tongue diagnosis system. It is still challenging, because there exists the personal diversity in tongue appearances such as size, shape, and color. This paper proposes an innovative segmentation method that uses image thresholding, gray projection and active contour model (ACM). Specifically, an initial object region is first extracted by performing image thresholding in HSI (i.e., Hue Saturation Intensity) color space, and subsequent morphological operations. Then, a gray projection technique is used to determine the upper bound of the tongue body root for refining the initial object region. Finally, the contour of the refined object region is smoothed by ACM. Experimental results on a dataset composed of 100 color tongue images showed that the proposed method obtained more accurate segmentation results than other available state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords
HSI; image thresholding; gray projection; tongue image segmentation;
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