Tongue image constitution recognition based on Complexity Perception method

Background and Object: In China, body constitution is highly related to physiological and pathological functions of human body and determines the tendency of the disease, which is of great importance for treatment in clinical medicine. Tongue diagnosis, as a key part of Traditional Chinese Medicine inspection, is an important way to recognize the type of constitution.In order to deploy tongue image constitution recognition system on non-invasive mobile device to achieve fast, efficient and accurate constitution recognition, an efficient method is required to deal with the challenge of this kind of complex environment. Methods: In this work, we perform the tongue area detection, tongue area calibration and constitution classification using methods which are based on deep convolutional neural network. Subject to the variation of inconstant environmental condition, the distribution of the picture is uneven, which has a bad effect on classification performance. To solve this problem, we propose a method based on the complexity of individual instances to divide dataset into two subsets and classify them separately, which is capable of improving classification accuracy. To evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on three sizes of tongue datasets, in which deep convolutional neural network method and traditional digital image analysis method are respectively applied to extract features for tongue images. The proposed method is combined with the base classifier Softmax, SVM, and DecisionTree respectively. Results: As the experiments results shown, our proposed method improves the classification accuracy by 1.135% on average and achieves 59.99% constitution classification accuracy. Conclusions: Experimental results on three datasets show that our proposed method can effectively improve the classification accuracy of tongue constitution recognition.