A 30 meter land cover mapping of China with an efficient clustering algorithm CBEST

Abstract

© 2014, Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. Remote sensing based land cover mapping at large scale is time consuming when using either supervised or unsupervised classification approaches. This article used a fast clustering method—Clustering by Eigen Space Transformation (CBEST) to produce a land cover map for China. Firstly, 508 Landsat TM scenes were collected and processed. Then, TM images were clustered by combining CBEST and K-means in each pre-defined ecological zone (50 in total for China). Finally, the obtained clusters were visually interpreted as land cover types to complete a land cover map. Accuracy evaluation using 2159 test samples indicates an overall accuracy of 71.7% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.64. Comparisons with two global land cover products (i.e., Finer Resolution Observation and Monitoring of Global Land Cover (FROM-GLC) and GlobCover 2009) also indicate that our land cover result using CBEST is superior in both land cover area estimation and visual effect for different land cover types.