Color image segmentation through unsupervised Gaussian mixture models

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a novelty EM based algorithm for Gaussian Mixture Models with an unknown number of components. Although the EM (Expectation-Maximization) algorithm yields the maximum likelihood solution it has many problems: (i) it requires a careful initialization of the parameters; (ii) the optimal number of kernels in the mixture may be unknown beforehand. We propose a criterion based on the entropy of the pdf (probability density function) associated to each kernel to measure the quality of a given mixture model, and a modification of the classical EM algorithm to find the optimal number of kernels in the mixture. We apply our algorithm to the unsupervised color image segmentation problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.