Introduction to Tongue Image Analysis

Abstract

Tongue diagnosis is one of the most important and widely used diagnostic methods in Chinese medicine. Visual inspection of the human tongue offers a simple, immediate, inexpensive, and noninvasive solution for various clinical applications and self-diagnosis. Increasingly, powerful information technologies have made it possible to develop a computerized tongue diagnosis (CTD) system that is based on digital image processing and analysis. In this chapter, we first introduced the current state of knowledge on tongue diagnosis and CTD. Then, for the computational perspective, we provided brief surveys on the progress of tongue image analysis technologies including tongue image acquisition, preprocessing, and diagnosis classification.