Towards the objectification of tongue diagnosis: the degree of tooth-marked

Tongue diagnosis is one of the most valuable and widely used diagnostic methods in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). A tooth-marked tongue is an important objective index of the diagnosis of qi (yang) deficiency syndrome during the diagnosis of the TCM. In order to accurately analyze it, an effective method to confirm the amount of tooth-marked and to attain the degree of tooth-marked is brought forward. It sufficiently applies the characters of GVF snake and the features of the curvatures and gradients in the all points of tongue contour. The experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithm.