Statistical and neural methods for remote-sensing image classification and decision fusion: a comparative study

Abstract

This paper focuses on evaluating a number of statistical and neural methods for supervised, pixel-wise remote-sensing image classification and decision fusion. Despite the enormous progress in the analysis of remote sensing imagery over the past three decades, still much is desired in the area of image classiJication as no specxjk algorithm is known to provide accurate results under all circumstances. Decision fusion may be pursued to combine the outputs of dflerent classifiers applied on the same data, in the hope of combining the best of what each approach provides. We report the results of the comparison between several classification and fusion methods on two real datasets, one of which is the standard benchmark Satimage dataset. It is shown that the fusion approaches can indeed outpei$orm the pei$ormance of the best classif er.