Land use mapping of Hong Kong from Landsat images An evaluation

Abstract The use of Landsat 70 mm film images for the production of land use maps of Hong Kong, a small territory of 1061 km2 in area, was evaluated according to their planimetric accuracy and the accuracy of land use interpretation. Land use maps were produced at a scale around 1:250 000 with the aid of a Fairey additive viewer and at a scale of 1:88 500 through manual interpretation. Finally, an urban land use map at a scale of 1:25 000 was generated with a computer-assisted method of analysis of the Landsat data. It was concluded that these land use maps were all of an acceptable planimetric (±400m) and semantic accuracy (89 per cent), especially if a high level of generalization was intended. The computer-assisted method of analysis permits more detailed urban land use information to be extracted, but with an accuracy of only 69 per cent.