Support vector machine fusion of multisensor imagery in tropical ecosystems

One of the major stakeholders of image fusion is being able to process the most complex images at the finest possible integration level and with the most reliable accuracy. The use of support vector machine (SVM) fusion for the classification of multisensors images representing a complex tropical ecosystem is investigated. First, SVM are trained individually on a set of complementary sources: multispectral, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and a digital elevation model (DEM). Then a SVM-based decision fusion is performed on the three sources. SVM fusion outperforms all monosource classifications outputting results with the same accuracy as the majority of other comparable studies on cultural landscapes. SVM-based hybrid consensus classification does not only balance successful and misclassified results, it also uses misclassification patterns as information. Such a successful approach is partially due to the integration of DEM-extracted indices which are relevant to land cover mapping in non-cultural and topographically complex landscapes.