Combination of polar edge detection and active contour model for automated tongue segmentation

Author name used in this publication: David ZhangBiometrics Research Centre, Department of ComputingVersion of RecordPublishe

Review on the current trends in tongue diagnosis systems

AbstractTongue diagnosis is an essential process to noninvasively assess the condition of a patient's internal organs in traditional medicine. To obtain quantitative and objective diagnostic results, image acquisition and analysis devices called tongue diagnosis systems (TDSs) are required. These systems consist of hardware including cameras, light sources, and a ColorChecker, and software for color correction, segmentation of tongue region, and tongue classification. To improve the performance of TDSs, various types TDSs have been developed. Hyperspectral imaging TDSs have been suggested to acquire more information than a two-dimensional (2D) image with visible light waves, as it allows collection of data from multiple bands. Three-dimensional (3D) imaging TDSs have been suggested to provide 3D geometry. In the near future, mobile devices like the smart phone will offer applications for assessment of health condition using tongue images. Various technologies for the TDS have respective unique advantages and specificities according to the application and diagnostic environment, but this variation may cause inconsistent diagnoses in practical clinical applications. In this manuscript, we reviewed the current trends in TDSs for the standardization of systems. In conclusion, the standardization of TDSs can supply the general public and oriental medical doctors with convenient, prompt, and accurate information with diagnostic results for assessing the health condition

Tongue Segmentation Using Active Contour Model

Tongue is an organ of the human body for tasting sense. Healthy conditions can be known from observation of the surface tongue by an expert. Before analyzing the tongue, feature extraction process is needed to segment the tongue from image, so it is possible to develop an application that can segment the tongue image from opened mouth image. This research uses Canny Edge Detection and Active Contour method. Canny Edge Detection is used to find the edges of tongue. This method has four steps: Smoothing Gaussian Filter, Finding Gradients, Non-maximum Suppression, and Hysteresis Thresholding. After finding the tongue edge, Active Contour Model will be generating energy that can pull into edges curve that is already defined and cropping that to produce tongue image. Testing result of this research yield an accuracy rate of 75%, by which from all 40 tongue images, 30 are successfully segmented

TongueSAM: An Universal Tongue Segmentation Model Based on SAM with Zero-Shot

Tongue segmentation serves as the primary step in automated TCM tongue diagnosis, which plays a significant role in the diagnostic results. Currently, numerous deep learning based methods have achieved promising results. However, most of these methods exhibit mediocre performance on tongues different from the training set. To address this issue, this paper proposes a universal tongue segmentation model named TongueSAM based on SAM (Segment Anything Model). SAM is a large-scale pretrained interactive segmentation model known for its powerful zero-shot generalization capability. Applying SAM to tongue segmentation enables the segmentation of various types of tongue images with zero-shot. In this study, a Prompt Generator based on object detection is integrated into SAM to enable an end-to-end automated tongue segmentation method. Experiments demonstrate that TongueSAM achieves exceptional performance across various of tongue segmentation datasets, particularly under zero-shot. TongueSAM can be directly applied to other datasets without fine-tuning. As far as we know, this is the first application of large-scale pretrained model for tongue segmentation. The project and pretrained model of TongueSAM be publiced in :https://github.com/cshan-github/TongueSAM

Fast marching over the 2D Gabor magnitude domain for tongue body segmentation

Author name used in this publication: David ZhangVersion of RecordPublishe

Fully-automated tongue detection in ultrasound images

Tracking the tongue in ultrasound images provides information about its shape and kinematics during speech. In this thesis, we propose engineering solutions to better exploit the existing frameworks and deploy them to convert a semi-automatic tongue contour tracking system to a fully-automatic one. Current methods for detecting/tracking the tongue require manual initialization or training using large amounts of labeled images. This work introduces a new method for extracting tongue contours in ultrasound images that requires no training nor manual intervention. The method consists in: (1) application of a phase symmetry filter to highlight regions possibly containing the tongue contour; (2) adaptive thresholding and rank ordering of grayscale intensities to select regions that include or are near the tongue contour; (3) skeletonization of these regions to extract a curve close to the tongue contour and (4) initialization of an accurate active contour from this curve. Two novel quality measures were also developed that predict the reliability of the method so that optimal frames can be chosen to confidently initialize fully automated tongue tracking. This is achieved by automatically generating and choosing a set of points that can replace the manually segmented points for a semi-automated tracking approach. To improve the accuracy of tracking, this work also incorporates two criteria to re-set the tracking approach from time to time so the entire tracking result does not depend on human refinements. Experiments were run on 16 free speech ultrasound recordings from healthy subjects and subjects with articulatory impairments due to Steinert’s disease. Fully automated and semi automated methods result in mean sum of distances errors of 1.01mm±0.57mm and 1.05mm± 0.63mm, respectively, showing that the proposed automatic initialization does not significantly alter accuracy. Moreover, the experiments show that the accuracy would improve with the proposed re-initialization (mean sum of distances error of 0.63mm±0.35mm)

A tongue-print image database for recognition

Author name used in this publication: David ZhangBiometrics Research Centre, Department of ComputingVersion of RecordPublishe