Robust Image Segmentation with Mixtures of Student's t-Distributions

Gaussian mixture models have been widely used in image segmentation. However, such models are sensitive to outliers. In this paper, we consider a robust model for image segmentation based on mixtures of Student's
t
-distributions which have heavier tails than Gaussian and thus are not sensitive to outliers. The
t
-distribution is one of the few heavy tailed probability density functions (pdf) closely related to the Gaussian, that gives tractable maximum likelihood inference via the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Numerical experiments that demonstrate the properties of the proposed model for image segmentation are presented.