Effective Algorithm on Automatic Segmentation of Body of Tongue
一种有效的舌体自动化分割算法*

The correct segmentation of the body of tongue is premise to the information on diagnosis by the feature of tongue in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The main method at present is to get initial contour of the body of tongue by threshold algorithm or prior knowledge, and then makes the initial contour converge into the edge of the body of tongue by Snake model. However, there exist two flaws in these algorithms: Firstly, it is difficult to deal with some tongue images with low contrast, which behaves in similar contrast between surface of tongue and face; secondly, the initial contour can not overcome the influence of lip, and the final curve often converges into the edge of lip by Snake. Researching on the low level information of tongue images,a simple and effective strategy to solve these two limitations is proposed. At first,it used histogram equilibrium before the threshold algorithm, with which the images which were failed to be dealt with can now be done well. And then according to the prior knowledge about shape and position of the tongue,a geometric method to correct the edge influence on lip or corners of the mouth is puts forward.According to the results of experiments, this algorithm is effective.