Interactive tongue body segmentation

Despite the progress in tongue body segmentation, it remains a challenge to correctly segment the tongue body from any tongue images. As one possible solution, conventional interactive segmentation methods usually are not tailored for tongue body segmentation, and suffer from several limitations like poor efficiency and less specificity. In this paper, we extend the GaborFM method, and propose an interactive tongue body segmentation (ITBS) method by considering three principles: convergence, efficiency, and ease of use. Using the segmentation result of GaborFM for initialization, the proposed method allows the user to modify the segmentation by simply drawing a line segment at the true tongue body contour. Then ITBS exploits the information provided by the user to update the masks and edges, and update contour using fast marching. Experimental results show that ITBS can obtain correct results after less than 0.5 times of interactions in average, and is much efficient than conventional interactive segmentation methods.