EM Algorithm with Initialization Based on Incremental ${\cal}k-means$ for GMM and Its Application to Speaker Identification

Tn general. Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to estimate the speaker model from the speech for speaker identification. The parameter estimates of the GMM are obtained by using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. However the EM algorithm has such drawbacks that it depends heavily on the initialization and it needs the number of mixtures to be known. In this paper, to solve the above problems of the EM algorithm. we propose an EM algorithm with the initialization based on incremental for GMM. The proposed method dynamically increases the number of mixtures one by one until finding the optimum number of mixtures. Whenever adding one mixture, we calculate the mutual relationship between it and one of other mixtures respectively. Finally. based on these mutual relationships. we can estimate the optimal number of mixtures which are statistically independent. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by the experiment for artificial data. Also. we performed the speaker identification by applying the proposed method comparing with other approaches.