Unsupervised segmentation of hidden semi-Markov non-stationary chains

The Bayesian segmentation using Hidden Markov Chains (HMC) is widely used in various domains such as speech recognition, acoustics, biosciences, climatology, text recognition, automatic translation and image processing. On the one hand, hidden semi-Markov chains (HSMC), which extend HMC, have turned out to be of interest in many situations and have improved HMC-based results. On the other hand, the case of non-stationary data can pose an important problem in real-life situations, especially when the model parameters have to be estimated. The aim of this paper is to consider these two extensions simultaneously: we propose using a particular triplet Markov chain (TMC) to deal with non-stationary hidden semi-Markov chains. In addition, we consider a recent particular HSMC having the same computation complexity as the classical HMC. We propose a related parameter estimation method and the resulting unsupervised Bayesian segmentation is validated through experiments; in particular, a real radar image segmentations are provided.

► Introduction of a new family of non-stationary hidden semi-Markov models. ► Introduction of a general ICE based parameter estimation method. ► Application of the new models to unsupervised image segmentation.