AOTF based hyperspectral tongue imaging system and its applications in computer-aided tongue disease diagnosis

An AOTF-based hyperpsectral tongue imaging system which can capture both spectral and spatial information of human tongue is developed and used in computerized tongue diagnosis. This new type of tongue imaging system has the advantage of having no moving parts and can be scanned at very high rates. This makes the structure of the new system more compact and more suitable for tongue images capture. A series of hyperspectral images of tongue surface and sublingual veins are captured by using the new system. The automatic tongue segmentation and tongue features extraction based on hyperspectral images are also discussed. Preliminary experiment results show a great deal of potential of this system for computerized tongue diagnosis.