An objectifying system for color inspections of traditional Chinese medicine （CITCM） is developed. The entire system includes two parts ： The hardware and the software. The hardware is an image acquiring device under a standard lighting condition, and it mainly includes a xenon lamp with color temperature of 5 500 K as light source, an integrating sphere used for diffusing light and a high resolution CCD camera. The software is used for digital image processing, and the procedure is divided into three steps. Firstly the skin/non-skin classifi- cation is performed by utilizing the threshold in chrominance channels of the RGB color space. Secondly, the fa- cial features are localized by using the image segmentation and coordinates sorting. Finally, the facial special re- gion（SR） corresponding to five internal organs is achieved by utilizing masks designed to take advantage of mor- phology. Subsequently, the chromaticity is calculated. The system is tested by taking 83 samples of 30 young and 53 elderly people. The experiment shows that there is significant difference of all SRs between the young and the elderly, and the system has better performance for objectifying research of CITCM.
