Random Forest Ensembles and Extended Multiextinction Profiles for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Classification techniques for hyperspectral images based on random forest (RF) ensembles and extended multiextinction profiles (EMEPs) are proposed as a means of improving performance. To this end, five strategies-bagging, boosting, random subspace, rotation-based, and boosted rotation-based-are used to construct the RF ensembles. EPs, which are based on an extrema-oriented connected filtering technique, are applied to the images associated with the first informative components extracted by independent component analysis, leading to a set of EMEPs. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated on two benchmark hyperspectral images: the University of Pavia and Indian Pines. Comparative experimental evaluations reveal the superior performance of the proposed methods, especially those employing rotation-based and boosted rotation-based approaches. An additional advantage is that the CPU processing time is acceptable.