A knowledge-based approach for assessing the quality of Landsat water body mapping product

Quality assessment of water body mapping products derived from Landsat TM/ETM+ imagery is necessary to improve the product's quality. Up to now, great efforts have been made to improve the accuracy of the water extract, and the main approaches used for assessing the accuracy of the water mapping are performed based on sampling. Usually, the quality information is represented by using some statistical indicators. However, the spatial distribution of the product accuracy is unavailable. Hence, a novel approach for assessing the quality of water body products derived from Landsat TM/ETM+ imagery is proposed. An experiment is conducted to validate the proposed approach. Results show that the new approach is suitable for large-scale applications and can provide the producers and users with some important quality information.