  In this paper, we propose a new ellipsoidal mixture model. This model is
based a new probability density function belonging to the family of elliptical
distributions and designed to model points spread around an ellipsoidal
surface. Then, we consider a mixture model based on this density, whose
parameters are estimated with the help of an EM algorithm. The properties of
the estimates are studied theoretically and empirically. The algorithm is
compared to a state of the art ellipse fitting method and experimented on 3D
data.
