WenSiM: A Relative Accuracy Assessment Method for Land Cover Products Based on Optimal Transportation Theory

Land cover (LC) products play a crucial role in various fields such as change detection, resource management, and urban planning. The diversity in methods and principles used to create different products poses a challenge for researchers in choosing the most suitable one for research needs. Mainstream evaluation methods typically consider only a portion of the accuracy information from the product and require a significant effort in creating validation datasets. Here, we propose a relative accuracy assessment method for LC products based on optimal transport theory, which provides a comprehensive evaluation by utilizing a broader range of accuracy information within the product. The method can directly compute the similarity between the target product and the reference truth at a global scale, addressing the issue of quantitatively assessing product accuracy in the absence of a validation dataset. To validate the effectiveness of the method, we select Beijing as the study area to assess the accuracy of four LC products. The results suggest that the method allows for precise quantification of product accuracy, aligning closely with validation outcomes, which can provide valuable guidance to researchers in both product creation and selection.