Digital imaging system for physiological analysis by tongue colour inspection

Tongue diagnosis is one of the valuable diagnostic methods in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The salient advantage of tongue diagnosis lies in its simplicity and immediacy. However, tongue diagnosis lack of precision due to many reasons, like subjective interpretation of tongue color, etc. This paper presents a survey on recent research status of automated tongue color detection. Then some results of tongue color detection to allow interactive and more objective tongue analysis based on digital imaging and color image processing is introduced. A RGB based color segmentation method is used to segment out the tongue portion. An Asian tongue database with comprehensive information is also constructed.