Performance Comparison of the Support Vector Machine Algorithm with RBF Kernel and Random Forest in Classifying Tourism Images of Nusa Penida

Indonesia holds vast tourism potential, including Nusa Penida, Bali, renowned for its natural beauty. However, the adoption of modern technology to support tourism promotion and management remains limited. This study aims to compare the performance of Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel and Random Forest algorithms in classifying images of three main tourist attractions in Nusa Penida: Angel’s Billabong, Broken Beach, and Kelingking Beach. The dataset consists of 450 images processed using the Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) method for feature extraction. Two data split scenarios (80:20 and 70:30) were applied to evaluate the algorithms based on accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. The experimental results revealed that SVM with RBF kernel outperformed Random Forest in all scenarios, achieving the best results in the 70% training and 30% testing data split with an accuracy of 0.967, precision of 0.969, recall of 0.967, and F1-score of 0.967. While Random Forest demonstrated stable performance, it remained inferior to SVM with RBF kernel. This study concludes that SVM with RBF kernel is superior for image classification tasks, offering opportunities for implementing artificial intelligence technologies to advance the tourism sector in Indonesia.