Sublingual vein extraction algorithm based on hyperspectral tongue imaging technology

Abstract Among the parts of the human tongue surface, the sublingual vein is one of the most important ones which may have pathological relationship with some diseases. To analyze this information quantitatively, one primitive work is to extract sublingual veins accurately from tongue body. In this paper, a hyperspectral tongue imaging system instead of a digital camera is used to capture sublingual images. A hidden Markov model approach is presented to extract the sublingual veins from the hyperspectral sublingual images. This approach characterizes the spectral correlation and the band-to-band variability using a hidden Markov process, where the model parameters are estimated by the spectra of the pixel vectors forming the observation sequences. The proposed algorithm, the pixel-based sublingual vein segmentation algorithm, and the spectral angle mapper algorithm are tested on a total of 150 scenes of hyperspectral sublingual veins images to evaluate the performance of the new method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can extract the sublingual veins more accurately than the traditional algorithms and can perform well even in a noisy environment.