Application of HSV Model in Tongue Shape Recognition of TCM

The HSV colour space model is an intuitive cone colour model. Because the tongue is much redder than the whole face, and the lips are also much redder than other parts of the face, this paper adopts the HSV space model, and use the H component to separate the lips and tongue from the rest. Furthermore, since there is saliva on the surface of the tongue, it is easy to reflect when it is exposed to light, so the brightness of the tongue area is higher than that of the lips without saliva, and the tongue and lips can be separated by using the V component. The two are combined to obtain a relatively complete tongue image. Thus the HSV model is employed to propose a novel and effective tongue shape recognition method for the three shapes. The proposed method is also simple and easy to implement. Experimental results show that the propose method can improve the diagnosis efficiency, and the accuracy rate is higher than 92%.