A novel approach to extract sublingual vein from color image

Characteristics of tongue pose the most important information for traditional Chinese medicine diagnosis. So far, extensive studies have been made on extracting tongue surface features, but rarely refer to sublingual vein that is also diagnostically important. This paper presents a novel approach to extract spatial characteristics of sublingual vein based on the HSI color space using the H and S components. Sublingual vein structures have been successfully mapped for 113 out of 150 patients and healthy subjects.