Tongue-coating image segmentation based on combination of morphological gradient and watershed algorithms

Abstract

The segmentation of tongue-coating images is very important to computer-aided traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) clinic diagnosis system. By now, algorithms for this segmentation are in low-accuracy or high-complexity. Upon the edge-gradient feature of tongue-coating images, a new segmenting method is presented in this paper, which combines edge and region processing technologies. With the new method, the multi-scale morphological gradient images of the original images are taken firstly, and then watershed algorithm is used to segment them so that tongue-coating images are separated. The following experimental results show this method's effectiveness and efficiency.

Keywords:

• watershed algorithm
• morphological gradient
• multi-scale