The separation framework of tongue coating and proper in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Tongue diagnosis is a method to analyze disease by observing tongue, which composed of observing tongue proper and tongue coating. The separation of tongue coating and tongue proper is a premise to establish a system of automatic diagnosis by the feature of tongue image in traditional Chinese medicine, whose qualities affect on the performance of tongue diagnosis. In this paper, we present a novel separation framework of tongue coating and tongue proper: an automatic initialization of contour curve by the feature of tongue in HSV color space. Meanwhile, an improved level set algorithm is designed to assist the separation of tongue coating and tongue proper, in which we explicitly define an external energy that can move the zero level curve toward the object boundaries. Applying our method to the large database of tongue images, we achieve promising experimental results.