Mixture models with higher order moments

The authors present a novel method for mixed pixel classification where the classification of groups of mixed pixels is achieved by taking into consideration the higher order moments of the distributions of the pure and the mixed classes. The equations expressing the relationship between the higher order moments are used to augment the set of equations that express the relationship between the means only. The authors show that weighting these equations does not make the set of equations available less reliable. As a consequence, the number of equations can be increased and thus more classes than available bands can be identified. The method is exhaustively tested using simulated data and is also applied to real Landsat TM data for which ground data are available.