Accuracy and inaccuracy assessments in land-cover classification

Several measures assessing accuracy of land-cover classification are available, e.g., overall and class-averaged accuracies. Also the kappa statistic is widely used for this purpose. The authors discuss properties of these criteria and point out that the kappa statistic has an unfavorable feature. They propose an alternative coefficient based on Kullback-Leibler information. A test statistic for significance difference between coefficients is also established. Further, the Bayes risk, which takes types of misclassifications into account, is discussed. Their assessment measures are examined through actual error matrices by Z. Ma and R. L. Redmond (1995).