Abstract. In this paper, an efficient speaker identification based on robust vector quantization principal component analysis (VQ-PCA) is proposed to solve the problems from outliers and high dimensionality of training feature vectors in speaker identification. Firstly, the proposed method partitions the data space into several disjoint regions by roust VQ based on M-estimation. Secondly, the robust PCA is obtained from the covariance matrix in each region. Finally, our method obtains the Gaussian Mixture model (GMM) for speaker from the transformed feature vectors with reduced dimension by the robust PCA in each region. Compared to the conventional GMM with diagonal covariance matrix, under the same performance, the proposed method gives faster results with less storage and, moreover, shows robust performance to outliers.