Machine Learning-Based Classification of Asbestos-Containing Roofs Using Airborne RGB and Thermal Imagery

Detecting asbestos-containing roofs has been of great interest in the past few years as the substance negatively affects human health and the environment. Different remote sensing data have been successfully used for this purpose. However, RGB and thermal data have yet to be investigated. This study aims to investigate the classification of asbestos-containing roofs using RGB and airborne thermal data and state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) classification techniques. With the rapid development of ML reflected in this study, we evaluate three classifiers: Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost). We have used several image enhancement techniques to produce additional bands to improve the classification results. For feature selection, we used the Boruta technique; based on the results, we have constructed four different variations of the dataset. The results showed that the most important features for asbestos-containing roof detection were the investigated spectral indices in this study. From a ML point of view, SVM outperformed RF and XGBoost in the dataset using only the spectral indices, with a balanced accuracy of 0.93. Our results showed that RGB bands could produce as accurate results as the multispectral and hyperspectral data with the addition of spectral indices.