Most recently issued paper money includes security patterns that can be only identified by ultra violet (UV) illuminations. We propose an automatic extraction method of UV patterns for paper money inspection systems. The image acquired by camera and UV illumination is transformed to input data through preprocessing. And then, the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and split-and-merge expectation maximization (SMEM) algorithm are applied to segment the image represented by input data. In order to extract the UV pattern from the segmented image, we develop a criterion using the area of covariance vector and the weight value. The experimental results on various paper money are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.