Multsensor fusion based on Dempster-Shaefer evidence using beta mass functiong

This paper has dealt with a data fusion for the problem of land-cover classification using multisensor imagery. Dempster-Shafer evidence theory has been employed to combine the information extracted from the multiple data of same site. The Dempster-Shafer´s approach has two important advantages for remote sensing application: one is that it enables to consider a compound class which consists of several land-cover types and the other is that the incompleteness of each sensor data due to cloud-cover can be modeled for the fusion process. The image classification based on the Dempster- Shafer theory usually assumes that each sensor is represented by a single channel. The evidential approach to image classification, which utilizes a mass function obtained under the assumption of class-independent beta distribution, has been discussed for the multiple sets of mutichannel data acquired from different sensors. The proposed method has applied to the KOMPSAT-EOC panchromatic imagery and LANDSAT ETM+ data, which were acquired over Yongin/Nuengpyung area of Korean peninsula. The experiment has shown that it is greatly effective on the applications in which it is hard to find homogeneous regions represented by a single land-cover type in training process.