Scale Issues Related to the Accuracy Assessment of Land Use/Land Cover Maps Produced Using Multi-Resolution Data: Comments on “The Improvement of Land Cover Classification by Thermal Remote Sensing”. Remote Sens. 2015, 7(7), 8368–8390

Abstract

Much remote sensing (RS) research focuses on fusing, i.e., combining, multi-resolution/multi-sensor imagery for land use/land cover (LULC) classification. In relation to this topic, Sun and Schulz [1] recently found that a combination of visible-to-near infrared (VNIR; 30 m spatial resolution) and thermal infrared (TIR; 100–120 m spatial resolution) Landsat data led to more accurate LULC classification. They also found that using multi-temporal TIR data alone for classification resulted in comparable (and in some cases higher) classification accuracies to the use of multi-temporal VNIR data, which contrasts with the findings of other recent research [2]. This discrepancy, and the generally very high LULC accuracies achieved by Sun and Schulz (up to 99.2% overall accuracy for a combined VNIR/TIR classification result), can likely be explained by their use of an accuracy assessment procedure which does not take into account the multi-resolution nature of the data. Sun and Schulz used 10-fold cross-validation for accuracy assessment, which is not necessarily inappropriate for RS accuracy assessment in general. However, here it is shown that the typical pixel-based cross-validation approach results in non-independent training and validation data sets when the lower spatial resolution TIR images are used for classification, which causes classification accuracy to be overestimated.