Grouping attributes zero-shot learning for tongue constitution recognition

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) considers that the personal constitution determines the occurrence trend and therapeutic effects of certain diseases, which can be recognized by machine learning through tongue images. However, current machine learning methods are confronted with two challenges. First, there are not some larger tongue image databases available. Second, they do not use the domain knowledge of TCM, so that the imbalance of constitution categories cannot be solved. Therefore, this paper proposes a new constitution recognition method based on the zero-shot learning with the knowledge of TCM. To further improve the performance, a new zero-shot learning method is proposed by grouping attributes and learning discriminant latent features, which can better solve the imbalance problem of constitution categories. Experimental results on our constructed databases validate the proposed methods.