Tongue color visualization for local pixel

Tongue diagnosis is a unique and important diagnostic method in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). It is used to observe abnormal changes in the tongue color for identifying syndrome patterns. However, due to its qualitative, subjective and experience-based nature, it is hard to represent and visualize tongue color in computerized tongue diagnosis. This will undoubtedly limit the application of tongue color analysis in clinical practice. In this paper, we proposed a visualization system for local pixel separation to recognize this intrinsic pathological trait: tongue color. This system captures a digital image, extracts a contour of the tongue and constructs a lookup table. Finally, this lookup table is employed to construct some figures of different classes for the representation and visualization tongue color. The experimental results can draw a conclusion: Tongue color is a kind of pixel distribution.