Abstract:

The extraction of tongue area from digital image is essential to an automatic tongue diagnostic system in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Classic image segmentation methods couldn’t be effective due to its feature diversity. First, it was  tried to categorize existing research in this field for recent 5 years, especially for Snake mold,practical test will be given at the same time so as to summarizing advantages and disadvantages of representative methods. Three innovated approaches are proposed afterwards, which improve the performances at certain degree.

Key words:  tongue diagnoses, tongue segmentation, Snake, practical test, innovated approach