It is interesting to notice that Dempster-Schafer's rule manages correctly a great amount of sources, and therefore the conflict generated by these numerous sources.

While having a conjunctive behaviour, Dempster-Schafer's rule does not fail when a conflict occurs, unlike the simple conjunctive fusion. The classification rate of 81.36% (see table 47) is comparable to the rate obtained by quantified adaptive fusion (84.76%).

This good performance is due to the modeling of uncertainty () of each source to clearly determine a single class for a pixel to classify. This uncertainty represents the degree of confusion of the source. corresponds to the union of all the classes, and this choice makes it possible, in the event of conflict, to defer part of the mass of evidence on each class. There thus remains a possibility so that the class of membership of the pixel is any of all the classes.

In the event of conflict between some sources which judge impossible that the pixel belongs to a class c, and all the other sources (majority) which selected this same class c as most plausible for the pixel, uncertainty makes it possible to avoid the failure of fusion by assigning, for classes rejecting the option of class c, a small part of the mass of evidence to this class c (at the same time as for all the other classes). This mechanism makes it possible to avoid that the mass assigned to class c is brutally reset by only one source which considers impossible this class.

Table 47: Fusion by Dempster-Shafer's rule of the spectral bands MSS4 to MSS7 and out-image data: distance to roads, plateaux, vales, slope orientation, slope steepness, edges, irrigation, MNT and distance to urban areas.

Rates of classification obtained
Class	Number of pixels   correctly classified (A)	Number of pixels in samples      (B)	Rate of pixels     correctly classified (A/B)
1	400	459	87.15%
2	398	459	86.71%
3	234	306	76.47%
4	313	391	80.05%
5	409	459	89.11%
6	418	459	91.07%
7	260	459	56.64%
8	265	459	57.73%
9	443	459	96.51%
TOTAL	3140	3910	80.31%