Tongue image segmentation via color decomposition and thresholding

Tongue image segmentation is a crucial step in developing an automatic tongue diagnosis system. After exploring characteristics of image thresholding in different color spaces, we propose a simple and effective tongue image segmentation method. Specifically, the proposed method first extracts an initial tongue body region by performing image thresholding on the transformed hue component in HSI (Hue, Saturation, and Intensity) color space. Then, one of two image thresholding results on the red component of an original tongue image is adaptively selected to find the gap region between the tongue body root and the upper lip. Finally, the initial tongue body region is refined by removing fake object regions such as the upper lip to obtain final tongue image segmentation result. Experimental results on a tongue image dataset containing 200 subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.