THE LAND COVER MAPPING IN NORTH KOREA USING MODIS IMAGE;THE CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY ENHANCEMENT FOR INACCESSIBLE AREA USING GOOGLE EARTH

A major obstacle to classify and validate Land Cover maps is the high cost of generating reference data or multiple thematic maps for subsequent comparative analysis. In case of inaccessible area such as North Korea, the high resolution satellite imagery may be used as in situ data so as to overcome the lack of reliable reference data. The objective of this paper is to investigate the possibility of utilizing QuickBird (0.6m) of North Korea obtained from Google Earth data provided thru internet. Monthly NDVI images of nine months from the summer of 2004 were classified into L=54 cluster using ISODATA algorithm, and these L clusters were assigned to 7 classes; coniferous forest, deciduous forest, mixed forest, paddy field, dry field, water and built-up area. The overall accuracy and Kappa index were 85.98% and 0.82, respectively, which represents about 10% point increase of classification accuracy than our previous study based on GCP point data around North Korea. Thus we can conclude that Google Earth may be used to substitute the traditional in situ data collection on the site where the accessibility is severely limited.