Image processing for digital Chinese medicine tongue diagnosis

• Main Author: Kee, Shih Wei
• Other Authors: Zheng Jianmin
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66804
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has gain recognition by the west and is growing in popularity. In TCM, the inspection of tongue holds an important part in inspection diagnosis. This is because the tongue has many relations and connections to the body, it can provide strong visual indicators of any ailments or status of the person. Therefore, it is very useful and important in TCM. Image processing is the analysis and manipulation of images to retrieve data or output desired image. Image processing has been used in a wide variety of fields, from X ray imaging in the medical field to robot’s vision in the robotics field. A very popular application of image processing is for finding similar images, like the Google’s reverse image search function. As TCM tongue diagnosis is mostly based on visual inspection of the tongue, there is a possibility for this process to be done using image processing and hopefully make it automated for everyone to use easily. Hence, an application is being developed which would test the suitability and possibility of the use of image processing for TCM tongue diagnosis. The author has had some experience in Java Android Native Application development, but after some research and exploration, has decided to explore doing Android Hybrid Application development using the Ionic framework that has been gaining popularity in recent years. It will be the front-end of the system and provide the necessary functionalities, like camera and communication with the back-end. The author had adopted to store the image processing algorithms in the back-end server. There are numerous ways to carry out image processing, the author will be focusing on image to image comparison.