1. A method of characterizing diverse elements within hyper-spectral images, comprising the steps of: extracting a plurality of patches of pixels from within said hyper-spectral images as being patches around pixels of said elements to be characterized; computing the statistics of selected spectral features for each patch of pixels; computing a first classifier from feature-wise standard deviation of said selected spectral features in said each patch; computing a set of second classifiers from principal components of said selected spectral features in said each patch; computing a combined classifier based on the output of said first classifier and at least one of said second classifiers; and characterizing said elements based on the output of at least one of said classifiers.