DECISION LEVEL FUSION OF ORTHOPHOTO AND LIDAR DATA USING CONFUSION MATRIX INFORMATION FOR LNAD COVER CLASSIFICATION

Abstract. Automatic urban objects extraction from airborne remote sensing data is essential to process and efficiently interpret the vast amount of airborne imagery and Lidar data available today. The aim of this study is to propose a new approach for the integration of high-resolution aerial imagery and Lidar data to improve the accuracy of classification in the city complications. In the proposed method, first, the classification of each data is separately performed using Support Vector Machine algorithm. In this case, extracted Normalized Digital Surface Model (nDSM) and pulse intensity are used in classification of LiDAR data, and three spectral visible bands (Red, Green, Blue) are considered as feature vector for the orthoimage classification. Moreover, combining the extracted features of the image and Lidar data another classification is also performed using all the features. The outputs of these classifications are integrated in a decision level fusion system according to the their confusion matrices to find the final classification result. The proposed method was evaluated using an urban area of Zeebruges, Belgium. The obtained results represented several advantages of image fusion with respect to a single shot dataset. With the capabilities of the proposed decision level fusion method, most of the object extraction difficulties and uncertainty were decreased and, the overall accuracy and the kappa values were improved 7% and 10%, respectively.