ASSESSING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HYPERION SPECTRAL BANDS IN FOREST CLASSIFICATION

Abstract

The classification of vegetation in hyperspectral image scenes presents some challenges due to high band autocorrelations and problems dealing with many predictor variables. The Random Forests classification method is based on an ensemble of decision trees and attempts to address these issues by dealing with only a subset of image bands in each node of each decision tree. Random Forests has previously been used for classification of vegetation using hyperspectral data. However, the variable importance measure that is a by-product of the technique has largely been ignored. In this study we investigate the spectral qualities of variable importance in the classification of forest and non-forest in a single Hyperion scene. The spectral importance curve showed broad bands of importance over wavelength regions known to be significant in biochemical absorption.