Map comparison methods that simultaneously address overlap and structure

Abstract

Methods for map comparison such as the Kappa and Tau statistics have grown popular in applications of remote sensing accuracy assessment. These methods take pairs of raster maps as sets of paired observations and do not consider spatial structure except for cell-by-cell overlap. In contrast, landscape structure metrics such as mean patch size that are commonly used in landscape ecology do express spatial structure, however without addressing cell-by-cell overlap. This paper introduces a number of comparison methods that consider spatial structure and overlap simultaneously. They achieve this by involving the neighbourhood of a cell in the calculation of similarity at its location. For this, the methods make use of a distance weighted moving window. Two test cases demonstrate that the different comparison methods offer a spatial account of varied aspects of map similarity. It is found that the methods can best be used in conjunction with a visual analysis; they then serve to quantify, reject or confirm hypotheses. © Springer-Verlag 2006.