How does land use/land cover map's accuracy depend on number of classification classes?

Abstract

A land use/land cover map is an important input for different applications. However, the accuracy of land cover maps remains a great uncertainty and mapping accuracy assessment is not well-documented. The objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between overall accuracy and number of classification classes by conducting a literature review of land cover/land use studies. The results revealed a weak negative correlation between the map's accuracy and the number of classes. The paper suggests a decrease of 0.77% map's overall accuracy with respect to the increase of 1 land cover class. The average overall accuracy produced by 05 sensor type does not show the big difference. In addition, high spatial resolution sensor such as Airborne might not be always advantageous for producing high overall accuracy map since its accuracy depends on several factors including the number of land cover classes.