Paddy fields can be effectively used and conserved by assessing the current situation, e.g. the distribution of abandoned agricultural land on a regional scale, using satellite data. However, the estimation of the area covered by paddy fields via satellite images is vulnerable to misclassification, especially in mountainous areas because the radiance locally decreases owing to the slope and can result in incorrect identification. Paddy fields emit small amounts of radiance because they are covered with water and are often misclassified as other forms of land cover whose radiances decrease because of the steep terrain. In this study, we develop a method to directly correct the classification results of the images obtained from the Landsat TM using the characteristics of paddy terraces in the mountain area. We then apply this method to the Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan Province, China. The results show that the correction method significantly improves the accuracy of classifying paddy fields, and the kappa coefficient of land cover classification is same or more than that of ATCOR3, which is widely used for terrain correction for paddy fields.
