Noise-contrastive estimation is a new estimation principle that we have developed for parameterized statistical models. The idea is to train a classifier to discriminate between the observed data and some artificially generated noise, using the model log-density function in a logistic regression function. It can be proven that this leads to a consistent (convergent) estimator of the parameters. The method is shown to directly work for models where the density function does not integrate to unity (unnormalized models). The normalization constant (partition function) can be estimated like any other parameter. We compare the method with other methods that can be used to estimate unnormalized models, including score matching, contrastive divergence, and maximum-likelihood where the correct normalization is estimated with importance sampling. Simulations show that noise-contrastive estimation offers the best trade-off between computational and statistical efficiency. The method is then applied to the modeling of natural images.