Tongue image matching using color content

This paper addresses the problem of color image matching in medical diagnosis. The color matching of tongue images in different color spaces with different metrics have been investigated and is reported in this article. Two new metrics namely, sorted metric and probabilistic combined metric, are proposed. Existing distance measurements in coordinate space do not satisfy the reflexivity axiom. That means, they are not the valid metrics. To overcome this limitation, the sorted metric in coordinate space is proposed in coordinate space. To improve the matching performance, a probabilistic combined metric is proposed based on the theory of combining classifier. These metrics are applied for the matching of tongue color images and the results are encouraging. (C) 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.