Key issues in rigorous accuracy assessment of land cover products
By Stephen V. Stehman, Giles M. Foody. Remote Sensing of Environment, 2019
547 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Accuracy assessment and land cover mapping have been inexorably linked throughout the first 50 years of publication of Remote Sensing of Environment. The earliest developers of land-cover maps recognized the importance of evaluating the quality of their maps, and the methods and reporting format of these early accuracy assessments included features that would be familiar to practitioners today. Specifically, practitioners have consistently recognized the importance of obtaining high quality reference data to which the map is compared, the need for sampling to collect these reference data, and the role of an error matrix and accuracy measures derived from the error matrix to summarize the accuracy information. Over the past half century these techniques have undergone refinements to place accuracy assessment on a more scientifically credible footing. We describe the current status of accuracy assessment that has emerged from nearly 50 years of practice and identify opportunities for future advances. The article is organized by the three major components of accuracy assessment, the sampling design, response design, and analysis, focusing on good practice methodology that contributes to a rigorous, informative, and honest assessment. The long history of research and applications underlying the current practice of accuracy assessment has advanced the field to a mature state. However, documentation of accuracy assessment methods needs to be improved to enhance reproducibility and transparency, and improved methods are required to address new challenges created by advanced technology that has expanded the capacity to map land cover extensively in space and intensively in time.
Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Geography, Planning and Development
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/093ad922487bcd48b29c657cb99c73460c3347d3
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Citations in the corpus
- Global 10 m Land Use Land Cover Datasets: A Comparison of Dynamic World, World Cover and Esri Land Cover (2022, methodology): “Although our analysis provides important information about global model accuracies, it remains to be seen which LULC product provides area change estimates with the least amount of error as measured using design-based inference for area estimation [35,36].”
- Dynamic World, Near real-time global 10 m land use land cover mapping (2022, unknown): “…a standard derivative map product of the Dynamic World dataset and instead encourage users, as is standard practice, to develop assessments of their unique derivative map products using tools such as Collect Earth 40 designed for reference data collection and community standard guidance 41–43 .”