Earth & Environmental Sciences

Random Forest (RF) is a widely used classifier to show a good performance of hyperspectral data classification. However, such performance could be improved by increasing the diversity that characterizes the ensemble architecture. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble approach, namely rotation random forest via kernel principal component analysis (RoRF-KPCA). In particular, the original feature space is first randomly split into several subsets, and KPCA is performed on each subset to extract high order statistics. The obtained feature sets are merged and used as input to an RF classifier. Finally, the results achieved at each step are fused by a majority vote. Experimental analysis is conducted using real hyperspectral remote sensing images to evaluate the performance of the proposed method in comparison with RF, rotation forest, support vector machines, and RoRF-PCA. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.