Cracked Tongue Extraction Model Based on Improved U-Net Method

Tongue diagnosis holds significant importance in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), with cracked tongues serving as a key diagnostic feature. However, the considerable variability in the morphology, depth, and distribution of tongue cracks poses a challenge for accurate extraction. In this paper, a novel deep learning approach is proposed to enhance the decoder of the U-Net model for cracked tongue extraction by incorporating the Hybrid Parallel Attention Mechanism (HPAM). The inclusion of HPAM enables the model to better concentrate on the small-scale feature information of tongue cracks, thereby improving the accuracy of crack segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method across all three tongue crack datasets. The method achieves a MIoU of 69.31% on the open environment dataset, 76.05% MIoU on the non-open environment dataset, and an overall MIoU of 76.92% on the combined dataset. These results signify a significant improvement over existing methods. This study not only offers an effective approach for automating the extraction of cracked tongues but also contributes to the automation and accuracy of tongue diagnosis, thereby benefiting the field of TCM.