ABSTRACT
The lip color of a person is closely related to his or her health in the visual diagnosis of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The traditional method to judge the color of lips is through observing by a TCM doctor. The diagnosis result is affected not only by the doctor's knowledge and diagnosis experience, but also by the light, temperature and other environmental impacts. For these reasons, sometimes different doctors may make different judgement for the same lips. So it is urgently needed that an objective evaluation as reference for doctors can be obtained. A method based on support vector machine (SVM) that classifies lip color by computer automatically is presented in the present paper. Firstly, nine features of lip color in Hue, Saturation and Intensity (HSI) color space were extracted. Then, according to different combinations of these features five different experiments were conducted. By comparing the results of these experiments, it was discovered that the mean value is one of the most important features for the lip color. The overall effect of classification is better when the mean value and variance of HSI were chosen than other characteristics. In addition, experiments results demonstrated that the accuracy rate of classification is not improved when more features were adopted. The objective of the present paper is to select the appropriate characteristics and to combine them effectively to classify lip colors.