A Tongue-Print Image Database for Recognition

The tongue is a unique organ in that it can be stuck out of mouth for inspection, in this act offering a proof of life, and yet it is otherwise well protected in the mouth and is difficult to forge. The tongue also presents both geometric shape information and physiological texture information which are potentially useful in identity verification applications. Furthermore, the act of physically reaching or thrusting out is a convincing proof for the liveness. Despite these obvious advantages, little work has hitherto been done on tongue features. A primary factor for preventing such research is the lack of an available 3D tongue image database. In this paper, we present a newly developed 3D tongue image database, which includes both tongue geometric shape and surface textures of 134 subjects. This is the first attempt at making a 3D tongue image database available for the research community, with the ultimate goal of fostering the research on tongue biometrics. The new database can be a valuable resource for algorithm assessment, comparison and evaluation.