Classification of hyperspectral medical tongue images for tongue diagnosis

Human tongue is one of the important organs of the body, which carries abound of information of the health status. The images of the human tongue that are used in computerized tongue diagnosis of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are all RGB color images captured with color CCD cameras currently. However, this conversional method impedes the accurate analysis on the subjects of tongue surface because of the influence of illumination and tongue pose. To address this problem, this paper presents a novel approach to analyze the tongue surface information based on hyperspectral medical tongue images with support vector machines. The experimental results based on chronic Cholecystitis patients and healthy volunteers illustrate its effectiveness.