Cheek region extraction method for face diagnosis of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Face diagnosis is one of the four diagnostic methods of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The morbidity of the organs can be revealed from the face color. The cheeks contain abundant capillaries and have less interference with the noise, such as hair and beard, so they are considered as the important region to reflect the face color. A cheek region extraction method for face diagnosis of TCM is proposed in this paper. First, the face region is extracted from the original image which is captured by the tongue image analysis instrument for TCM. Then the face region image is rotated according to the eye positions to put straight the image. The lip chrome region is extracted using Fisher classifier, in which the lip chrome region will be binarized to position the mouth corner. Finally, based on the geometric structure of the face, the skin block center is determined to extract the cheek region automatically. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can achieve higher segmentation accuracy.