Accuracy assessment of remote-sensing based land-cover mapping

This paper assessed the quality of remote-sensing based land-cover mapping for China at a scale of 1 to 250,000 in 2005 by comparison of area between remote sensing mapping and statistical survey. The 2005's land-cover data surveyed by the Ministry of Land and Resources of China were used as reference to assess accuracy of remote sensing based land cover mapping. The assessment was conducted at three levels, first for 2,116 county units, then for 31 provincial units, and finally for the entire nation. The resulting percentages of accuracy for the three levels of assessment were 65.06%, 71.74% and 83.93%, respectively. The results suggest that the remote-sensing based land-cover mapping for China has high and reliable accuracy.