Comparison and validation of five land cover products over the African continent
Abstract: Earth surface has always been an interesting scientific study area. it is tightly connected with other researches such as hydrology, ecosystem, atmosphere and climate change. Among other options, satellite collected earth surface information has several advantages including its objectivity, synoptic view, large scale and relatively short time intervals. A series of satellite derived land cover products were generated to provide for the science community, some of them are free of access to all users. This study chooses five free land cover products over the African continent to find out the similarities (differences) among them, and to find out their classification accuracy by using Google Earth derived reference data. The five land cover products are: MODIS, USGS, UMD, GLC2000 and GlobCover. The results of this study show understandable agreement across the five land cover products. Discrepancies mainly attributed to the different data source and generation process used by each land cover product, furthermore the data pre-process procedures applied to these products in this study may also share some responsibility. Accuracy assessment shows relatively low accuracy of about 54% as an average. Reasons for the low accuracy could be the quality and availability of reference data, and possible biases introduced during visual interpretation and labeling of validation scenes. The findings of this study suggest users be cautious about any particular land cover product, aware of their weakness and strength in their applications.
AT THIS PAGE YOU CAN DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE ESSAY. (follow the link to the next page)