Abstract. The quaternion Bingham distribution has been used to model preferred crystallographic orientation, or crystallographic texture, in polycrystalline materials in the materials science and geological communities. A primary difficulty in applying the Bingham distribution has been the lack of an efficient method for fitting the distribution parameters with respect to the materials underlying crystallographic symmetry or any statistical sample symmetry due to processing. In this paper we present a symmetrized distribution, based on the quaternion Bingham, which can account for any general combination of crystallographic or sample symmetries. We also introduce a numerical scheme for estimating the parameters of the symmetrized distribution based on the well known expectation maximization algorithm.

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