A Method of Classifying Tongue Colors for Traditional Chinese Medicine Diagnosis Based on the CIELAB Color Space
Objective tongue color analysis is an important research point for tongue diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine. In this paper a research based on the clinical process of diagnosing tongue color is reported. The color data in RGB color space were firs
- PDF / 252,301 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 430 x 660 pts Page_size
- 64 Downloads / 132 Views
National Laboratory of Color Science and Engineering Beijing Institute of Technology Beijing 100081, China [email protected] 2 School of Preclinical Medicine Beijing University of Chinese Medicine Beijing 100029, China [email protected] 3 Medical Examination Center of Beijing TongRen Hospital Beijing 100730, China
Abstract. Objective tongue color analysis is an important research point for tongue diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine. In this paper a research based on the clinical process of diagnosing tongue color is reported. The color data in RGB color space were first transformed into the data in CIELAB color space, and the color gamut of the displayed tongue was obtained. Then a numerical method of tongue color classification based on the Traditional Chinese Medicine (for example: light white tongue, light red tongue, red tongue) was developed. The conclusion is that this research can give the description and classification of the tongue color close to those given by human vision and may be carried out in clinical diagnosis.
1 Introduction The analysis of tongue color is one of the important research points. The objective of it is to describe and classify the color of the tongue with some objective data system or method, and to provide a new way to do the research. In the last 10 years, the development of the technology has provided some new methods for the objective research. In the current researches, the RGB color space is always utilized in the collecting devices (e.g. digital cameras) and displaying devices (e.g. monitors) [1-5]. When RGB color space is used, there is a problem that the color data we got or displayed are closely related to the devices we used. Therefore, the same tongue color data from different digital cameras may be represented with different color. In order to display the tongue color uniquely and truly, we need to characterize the display devices. Even though, we can only analyze tongue color data in definite display device to make sure of the correctness of the research. Once the data are transmitted to other D. Zhang (Ed.): ICMB 2008, LNCS 4901, pp. 153–159, 2007. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007
154
B. Li et al.
devices, the problem of color distortion will also appear. According to this, the conclusion of analysis based on the RGB color space can’t truly describe the tongue color. In order to conquer this problem, we brought forward a method based on the CIELAB color space. According to it, we studied the distribution of the tongue color in the color gamut to find a more suitable method to classify the tongue color of Traditional Chinese Medicine (i.e. red tongue, light red tongue, light white tongue). Then we analyzed and described tongue colors based on the vision characters, and got the typical color of every kind of tongue colors. All of these are used to work out an exact and simple method which can be widely applied to classifying the tongue color for the clinical tongue diagnosis of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
2 Tongue Color and CIELAB Uniform Color
Data Loading...
