TOM: An Open-Source Tongue Segmentation Method with Multi-Teacher Distillation and Task-Specific Data Augmentation

TL;DR

This paper introduces TOM, an open-source tongue segmentation model using multi-teacher distillation and data augmentation, achieving high accuracy with significantly fewer parameters, and providing accessible tools for TCM practitioners.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel tongue segmentation model based on multi-teacher knowledge distillation and diffusion-based data augmentation, offering a lightweight, high-performance, and publicly available tool.

Findings

Achieved 95.22% mIoU with 96.6% fewer parameters.

Enhanced generalization through diffusion-based data augmentation.

Improved TCM classification accuracy using segmented tongue patches.

Abstract

Tongue imaging serves as a valuable diagnostic tool, particularly in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The quality of tongue surface segmentation significantly affects the accuracy of tongue image classification and subsequent diagnosis in intelligent tongue diagnosis systems. However, existing research on tongue image segmentation faces notable limitations, and there is a lack of robust and user-friendly segmentation tools. This paper proposes a tongue image segmentation model (TOM) based on multi-teacher knowledge distillation. By incorporating a novel diffusion-based data augmentation method, we enhanced the generalization ability of the segmentation model while reducing its parameter size. Notably, after reducing the parameter count by 96.6% compared to the teacher models, the student model still achieves an impressive segmentation performance of 95.22% mIoU. Furthermore, we packaged and deployed the trained model as both an online and offline segmentation tool (available at https://itongue.cn/), allowing TCM practitioners and researchers to use it without any programming experience. We also present a case study on TCM constitution classification using segmented tongue patches. Experimental results demonstrate that training with tongue patches yields higher classification performance and better interpretability than original tongue images. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source and freely available tongue image segmentation tool.