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International Journal of Remote Sensing

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Preface: Spatial accuracy in remote sensing

Jingxiong Zhang; Giles M. Foody

To cite this Article Zhang, Jingxiong and Foody, Giles M.(2009) 'Preface: Spatial accuracy in remote sensing', International
Journal of Remote Sensing, 30: 20, 5239 — 5242
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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01431160903131059

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 International Journal of Remote Sensing
Vol. 30, No. 20, 20 October 2009, 5239–5242

Preface: Spatial accuracy in remote sensing

The International Symposia on Spatial Accuracy Assessment in Natural Resources

and Environmental Sciences (commonly abbreviated to ‘Accuracy’) have been held at
various locations since 1994. This series of biennial symposia is organized by the
International Spatial Accuracy Research Association (http://www.spatial-accuracy.
org/) and focuses on uncertainty in spatial information, analysis, and applications,
which concerns measuring, describing, modelling, propagating, and visualizing
uncertainty in spatial information and process models, especially those concerning
the environment and natural resources.
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As part of this well established and successful international symposia series,

‘Accuracy 2008’ was held in Shanghai, China, from 25-27 June, 2008. This eighth
symposium in the series followed the tradition evident in past symposia and, to
emphasize strategic and systematic research, covered a wider variety of topics ranging
from theories to practice, from generic to specific, from methods to applications. A
distinctive theme on remote sensing comprising topics such as validation, error
analysis, scale, and data assimilation was included in the symposium reflecting an
emphasis that is commonly placed upon uncertainty in remote sensing of the
environment.
The papers included in this special issue were selected from a pool of more than 30
symposium papers focused on remote sensing topics. Each paper included in the
special issue has been developed since the symposium with the benefit of valuable
comments from anonymous referees. Here, a brief overview of the work reported in
these papers is provided to help give a general context for the special issue.
Accuracy and uncertainty have been recognized as major issues in remote sensing
and allied subjects for a considerable time (Goodchild and Gopal 1989, Heuvelink
1998, Congalton 1991). Awareness of key issues and development of techniques have
led to the situation in which accuracy assessment is now seen as an essential compo-
nent of major remote sensing projects (Justice et al. 2000, Homer et al. 2007). The
subject is, however, still a major topic of research with many challenges to address.
The literature, for example, contains discussions on a variety of methods that could be
used (Liu et al. 2007, Lu and Weng 2007, Gomez et al. 2008). Much research echoes
longstanding concerns over accuracy metrics and assessment, while other reflects
evolving research philosophy in spatial uncertainty (Kyriakidis and Dungan 2002,
Czaplewski and Patterson 2003, Lunetta and Lyon 2004, Steele 2005, van Oort 2007,
Goodchild 2008). The series of Accuracy symposia has also contributed to the debates
linked to aspects of accuracy assessment (e.g. Stehman et al. 2000, Foody 2002, 2008,
Pontius and Connors 2006). The papers in this special issue build on the foundations
laid by earlier work and contribute to several key topics.
A set of fundamental issues connected with the design of an accuracy assessment
programme are addressed by some of the papers. For example, Stehman (2009)
addresses issues connected with support size while Foody (2009) considers issues
connected with sample size. The latter is considered mainly with regard to compara-
tive studies, which is a central feature of other papers, such as Atkinson’s (2009)

International Journal of Remote Sensing

ISSN 0143-1161 print/ISSN 1366-5901 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/01431160903131059
 5240 J. Zhang and G. M. Foody

discussion on super-resolution mapping. Another basic issue addressed by some

papers is linked to the quality of the ground reference data used and associated
implications for an accuracy assessment programme. Sarmento et al. (2009), for
example, consider the confidence that a researcher may have with class labels used
in an accuracy assessment and Ge et al. (2009) report on a non-standard approach for
accuracy assessment. Papers also develop important topics such as issues connected
with uncertainty and error propagation (Liu and Chun 2009, Stein and Hamm 2009),
scale transform in remote sensing products (Tao et al. 2009), scale effects on albedo
estimation in regions of mountainous terrain (Wen et al. 2009) and validation issues in
models (Huang et al. 2009). Finally, papers also address issues associated with data
conflation (Zhang et al. 2009, Tong et al. 2009), location uncertainty (Wu et al. 2009)
and how uncertainty information may be used to enhance analyses (Goncalves et al.
2009) as well as discussions on the accuracy with which vegetation structural
properties may be estimated (Wang et al. 2009). The various topics addressed by
the papers in this special issue reflect just a small part of the subject which will be
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further developed and explored at the next symposium, scheduled for Leicester, UK,
in 2010.

Jingxiong Zhang
Giles M. Foody
Guest editors

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