ACCOUNTING FOR IMPORTANCE OF VARIABLES IN MUL TI-SENSOR DATA FUSION USING RANDOM FORESTS

To account for the importance of variable in multi-sensor data fusion, random forests are applied to supervised land-cover classification. The random forests approach is a non-parametric ensemble classifier based on CART-like trees. Its distinguished feature is that the importance of variable can be estimated by randomly permuting the variable of interest in all the out-of-bag samples for each classifier. Supervised classification with a multi-sensor remote sensing data set including optical and polarimetric SAR data was carried out to illustrate the applicability of random forests. From the experimental result, the random forests approach could extract important variables or bands for land-cover discrimination and showed good performance, as compared with other non-parametric data fusion algorithms.