Computer Aided Image Enhancement Of Tongue For Diagnosis In Ayurvedic Medical Treatment

Abstract

Ayurveda is one of the traditional medical systems practiced in India and south Asian countries from ancient times. Tongue diagnosis is one of the important areas in physical diagnosis of treatment of health disorders in Ayurveda. The diagnosis is usually carried out by the medical practitioner with visually understanding the tongue, but the process of understanding the tongue image is not an easy task to carry out. The difficulty arises because of the irregular shape of the tongue, overlapping of colors, effect of outside light, dominance of saliva on cracks and buds etc. In this paper, we propose an application of computer aided digital image enhancement methods for processing the tongue image to highlight the true color and white coating, cracks, pimples/buds etc., so that the practitioner can get more valuable information compared to direct visual examination of the tongue. The method mainly consists of two techniques; first, color image filtering and enhancement for identifying the true nature of colors on different parts of the tongue and to bring out white coating; second, contrast enhancement and image sharpening in grey scale for highlighting the shape, cracks, buds and pimples. The aim of our method is to help in reducing the complexity in tongue image understanding for the practitioner. The data of the experimental results reveal that our method produces significant useful result for the tongue diagnosis.