Multiple classifier systems for classification of multifrequency PolSAR images with limited training samples

The aim of this article is to improve land-cover classification accuracy from multifrequency full-polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) observations using multiple classifier systems (MCSs) when limited training samples are available. Two types of popular MCSs, tree-based MCSs and neural-based MCSs, were compared with individual decision tree (DT) and neural network methods. Moreover, an objective majority voting (OMV) was proposed and compared with majority voting (MV) and weighted MV (WMV) to fuse the results of the MCSs. Experimental tests were performed on three benchmark PolSAR data sets with different frequencies (X, C, and L) over the San Francisco Bay, CA. The results indicated (1) tree-based MCSs and neural-based MCSs, in general, produced higher overall, producerʼs and userʼs accuracies than the related individual methods, i.e. DT and NN, with limited training samples; (2) tree-based MCSs were also often more accurate and much faster than neural-based MCSs; (3) regarding robustness, among the MCSs, random forest showed higher stability while bagging showed lower stability in the classification of three PolSAR data sets; (4) the OMV proposed in this article usually outperformed its competitors, i.e. MV and WMV; (5) the results obtained by the methods from the C-band data set were more accurate and more reliable than those obtained from the X- and L-band data sets.