Objective: To propose a method to segment tongue- images efficiently, and extract tongue- body accurately and quickly. Methods: Firstly, a kind of color- images' pre- processing technique was used to solve tongue-...Objective: To propose a method to segment tongue- images efficiently, and extract tongue- body accurately and quickly. Methods: Firstly, a kind of color- images' pre- processing technique was used to solve tongue- surface reflection problem. Neighbouring and similar region's information was used to restore the region with tongue- surface reflection problem by replacement. Secondly, the restored image was transformed into a gray one, and then processed by mathematical morphological operation- dilation to get a closed- loop edge. The third technique used was watershed algorithm, which is an usual tool in image segmentation. 'Watershed' function of matlab software was used to complete this algorithm. After that, region- combination technique was used. Through measuring neighbourship and similarity of regions, a non- objective and non- background region was merged into one of its neighbouring regions. This step was repeated until only two regions, objective and background regions, were left in the image. At last, corresponding to the merged image, tongue- body image was got from the original image. Results: 316 images were randomly taken from the image library for experiments, and 299 images were correctly segmented, so, the successful ratio is 94.62%. On the other hand, average time of running this method was about 50 s under whole sampling environment. Conclusion: The method presented in this paper can segment a tongue- body image from its original one effectively, and thus laying a good foundation for the following analysis work.展开更多
基金National Natural Science Foundation of China grant number: 30371717
文摘Objective: To propose a method to segment tongue- images efficiently, and extract tongue- body accurately and quickly. Methods: Firstly, a kind of color- images' pre- processing technique was used to solve tongue- surface reflection problem. Neighbouring and similar region's information was used to restore the region with tongue- surface reflection problem by replacement. Secondly, the restored image was transformed into a gray one, and then processed by mathematical morphological operation- dilation to get a closed- loop edge. The third technique used was watershed algorithm, which is an usual tool in image segmentation. 'Watershed' function of matlab software was used to complete this algorithm. After that, region- combination technique was used. Through measuring neighbourship and similarity of regions, a non- objective and non- background region was merged into one of its neighbouring regions. This step was repeated until only two regions, objective and background regions, were left in the image. At last, corresponding to the merged image, tongue- body image was got from the original image. Results: 316 images were randomly taken from the image library for experiments, and 299 images were correctly segmented, so, the successful ratio is 94.62%. On the other hand, average time of running this method was about 50 s under whole sampling environment. Conclusion: The method presented in this paper can segment a tongue- body image from its original one effectively, and thus laying a good foundation for the following analysis work.
