Learning-based tongue detection for automatic tongue color diagnosis system

Tongue diagnosis is expected to be used for preventive medicine, because it can check the health condition comprehensively. For the computer-assisted tongue diagnosis, automatic tongue detection from the facial pictures is needed. In this study, we employed deep learning-based tongue detection and compared its performance with a conventional machine learning method. We found that the deep learning-based method can detect the tongue perfectly from the stably captured facial pictures. Besides, this study clarified that it can detect the tongue quite accurately from freely captured facial pictures as well by giving appropriate training datasets.