Sample Design and Analysis for Thematic Map Accuracy Assessment: An Approach Based on Domain Estimation for the Validation of Land Cover Products

摘要

Remote sensing data has been extensively used to generate land cover and land use maps for a variety of purposes using automatic classification approaches. However, while major efforts have been made in the development and description of automatic techniques for land cover classification, the survey sampling for the accuracy assessment of land cover maps evaluation is either insufficient or incorrectly reported. In this paper we review the basic components that constitute a statistically rigorous accuracy assessment for land cover maps evaluation. Simultaneously, we focus on the adequate estimation of overall, user's and producer's accuracies under a stratified sampling design and introduce an unexploited approach for their calculation based on domain estimation.