Land use mapping of Hong Kong from Landsat images An evaluation

Abstract

Abstract The use of Landsat 70 mm film images for the production of land use maps of Hong Kong, a small territory of 1061 km2 in area, was evaluated according to their planimetric accuracy and the accuracy of land use interpretation. Land use maps were produced at a scale around 1:250 000 with the aid of a Fairey additive viewer and at a scale of 1:88 500 through manual interpretation. Finally, an urban land use map at a scale of 1:25 000 was generated with a computer-assisted method of analysis of the Landsat data. It was concluded that these land use maps were all of an acceptable planimetric (±400m) and semantic accuracy (89 per cent), especially if a high level of generalization was intended. The computer-assisted method of analysis permits more detailed urban land use information to be extracted, but with an accuracy of only 69 per cent.