The segmentation of the body of the tongue based on the improved snake algorithm in traditional Chinese medicine

The segmentation of the body of tongue is a premise to establishing a system of automatic diagnosis by the features of the tongue in traditional Chinese medicine, whose qualities affect the performance of tongue diagnosis. In order to overcome two key difficulties with the initialization and boundary concavities, a new active contour model is introduced as a segmentation method. We present an automatic initialization of snake by the feature of tongue in the HSV space. Multi-resolution wavelet (Gabor) decomposition is applied in an active contour model generating the edge energy of the image. Experiments on real tongue images show the good performance of this method.