Multiple Flights or Single Flight Instrument Fusion of Hyperspectral and ALS Data? A Comparison of their Performance for Vegetation Mapping

Fusion of remote sensing data often improves vegetation mapping, compared to using data from only a single source. The effectiveness of this fusion is subject to many factors, including the type of data, collection method, and purpose of the analysis. In this study, we compare the usefulness of hyperspectral (HS) and Airborne Laser System (ALS) data fusion acquired in separate flights, Multiple Flights Data Fusion (MFDF), and during a single flight through Instrument Fusion (IF) for the classification of non-forest vegetation. An area of 6.75 km(2) was selected, where hyperspectral and ALS data was collected during two flights in 2015 and one flight in 2017. This data was used to classify three non-forest Natura 2000 habitats i.e., Xeric sand calcareous grasslands (code 6120), alluvial meadows of river valleys of the Cnidion dubii (code 6440), species-rich Nardus grasslands (code 6230) using a Random Forest classifier. Our findings show that it is not possible to determine which sensor, HS, or ALS used independently leads to a higher classification accuracy for investigated Natura 2000 habitats. Concurrently, increased stability and consistency of classification results was confirmed, regardless of the type of fusion used; IF, MFDF and varied information relevance of single sensor data. The research shows that the manner of data collection, using MFDF or IF, does not determine the level of relevance of ALS or HS data. The analysis of fusion effectiveness, gauged as the accuracy of the classification result and time consumed for data collection, has shown a superiority of IF over MFDF. IF delivered classification results that are more accurate compared to MFDF. IF is always cheaper than MFDF and the difference in effectiveness of both methods becomes more pronounced when the area of aerial data collection becomes larger.