Development of the digital tongue inspection system with image analysis

In oriental medicine, the color and shape of the tongue gives much physiological information about the human body, and many oriental medical doctors have diagnosed patient's diseases using these information. This paper shows a Digital Tongue Inspection System that has been developed that consists of the implemented hardware part for tongue image acquisition, the image processing part that includes color interpolation, an edge detection algorithm for tongue area separation and tongue color detection algorithm and a database and user interface system for archiving and managing the acquired tongue images.