Measure of Similarity between GMMs Based on Geometry-Aware Dimensionality Reduction

Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are used in many traditional expert systems and modern artificial intelligence tasks such as automatic speech recognition, image recognition and retrieval, pattern recognition, speaker recognition and verification, financial forecasting applications and others, as simple statistical representations of underlying data. Those representations typically require many high-dimensional GMM components that consume large computing resources and increase computation time. On the other hand, real-time applications require computationally efficient algorithms and for that reason, various GMM similarity measures and dimensionality reduction techniques have been examined to reduce the computational complexity. In this paper, a novel GMM similarity measure is proposed. The measure is based on a recently presented nonlinear geometry-aware dimensionality reduction algorithm for the manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices. The algorithm is applied over SPD representations of the original data. The local neighborhood information from the original high-dimensional parameter space is preserved by preserving distance to the local mean. Instead of dealing with high-dimensional parameter space, the method operates on much lower-dimensional space of transformed parameters. Resolving the distance between such representations is reduced to calculating the distance among lower-dimensional matrices. The method was tested within a texture recognition task where superior state-of-the-art performance in terms of the trade-off between recognition accuracy and computational complexity has been achieved in comparison with all baseline GMM similarity measures.