1. A method of classifying an unknown object as being a member of one of a plurality of classes, each of the classes being defined by feature data for a training set of known objects, each known object of the set having known class membership, the method comprising: performing principal component analysis of the feature data to discard features having negligible information regarding class membership to produce a reduced feature data set; conducting projection pursuit on the reduced feature data set to accentuate differences between the classes as represented by the reduced feature data set to produce a further reduced feature data set; estimating a distribution of the further reduced feature data set for each of the classes represented in the training set; and evaluating measured feature data of the unknown object to determine membership in one of the classes.