Patent ID: 7200243

Claim:
A method for enhancing an image containing endmembers, comprising: selecting at least one measure of disparity; partitioning at least one first set of said endmembers in said image into at least one second set of said endmembers, each said second set incorporating at least one site having some spectral content, wherein said at least one site is a generic element of a lattice, and wherein spatial consistency is imposed on said spectral content of each said site so that each said at least one second set is associated with a spatially smooth region in said image; and using said at least one measure of disparity, applying a linear mixing model to said at least one second set to globally label said at least one second set, wherein said method yields improvements in: assessment of the type and amount of materials in a scene, unsupervised clustering of a scene, and post-processing smoothing operations suitable for application to diverse techniques for terrain categorization and classification.