## Should we always normalize image features before classification?

The quick answer is of course not. But if I am writing this post is because I have been myself giving a rule of thumb to students for a while without explaining the details.

When performing image classification (supervised or unsupervised) I always tell students to normalize the features. This normalization can be for instance just standardization (subtract the mean and divide by the standard deviation), although other approaches are possible.

The goal of this normalization is being able to compare apples and oranges: many classification algorithms are based on a distance in the feature space, and in order to give equal weight to all features, they have to have similar ranges. For instance, if we have 2 features like the NDVI, which ranges from -1 to 1, and the slope of a topographic surface which could be between 0° and 90°, the Euclidean distance would give much more weight to the slope and the NDVI values would not have much influence in the classification.

This is why the TrainImagesClassifier and the ImageClassifier applications in the ORFEO Toolbox have the option to provide a statistics file with the mean and standard deviation of the features so they samples can be normalized.

This is needed for classifiers like SVM, unless custom kernels suited to particular sets of features are used.

Most OTB users have started using the Random Forest classifier since it was made available by the integration of the OpenCV Machine Learning module. And not long ago, someone told me that she did not notice any difference with and without feature normalization. Let’s see why.

A Random Forest classifier uses a committee of decision trees. The decision trees split the samples at each node of the tree by thresholding one single feature. The learning of the classifier amounts basically at finding the value of the threshold at each node which is the optimum to split the samples.

The decision trees used by the Random Forest implementation in OpenCV use the Gini impurity in order to find the best split1. At any node of the tree during the learning, the samples are sorted in increasing order of the feature. Then all possible threshold values are used to split the samples into 2 sets and the Gini impurity is computed for every possible split. The impurity index does not use the values of the features, but only the labels of the samples. The values of the features are only used in order to sort the samples.

Any pre-processing of the features which is monotonic will not change the value of the Gini impurity and therefore will have no effect on the training of a Random Forest classifier.

## Footnotes:

1

Actually, a variant of the Gini impurity is used, but this does not change the rationale here.