Unsupervised learning of finite mixtures using entropy regularization and its application to image segmentation

When fitting finite mixtures to multivariate data, it is crucial to select the appropriate number of components. Under regularization theory, we aim to resolve this ldquounsupervisedrdquo learning problem via regularizing the likelihood by the full entropy of posterior probabilities for finite mixture fitting. Two deterministic annealing implementations are further proposed for this entropy regularized likelihood (ERL) learning. Through some asymptotic analysis of the deterministic annealing ERL (DAERL) learning, we find that the global minimization of the ERL function in an annealing way can lead to automatic model selection on finite mixtures and also make our DAERL algorithms less sensitive to initialization than the standard EM algorithm. The simulation experiments then demonstrate that our algorithms can provide some promising results just as our theoretic analysis. Moreover, our algorithms are evaluated in the application of unsupervised image segmentation and shown to outperform other state-of-the-art methods.