HORIZONTAL ACCURACY ASSESSMENT OF GOOGLE EARTH DATA OVER TYPICAL REGIONS OF ASIA

Abstract. Google Earth provide the most accurate and available global high resolution imagery, covering nearly the entire land surface of the earth. However, the precision of Google Earth’s data has not been fully validated.The traditional ground measurement method is difficult to verify the horizontal precision of remote sensing over a large area. This paper focuses on typical regions of Asia, aiming to verify the precision of GE’s data based on purchased WorldView (WV) data by utilization of statistical analysis method.The results show that the highest precision has been estimated as 4.96–6.83 meters over the part of Japan, India and Kazakhstan, respectively. The lowest precision 16.53 and 16.59 meters primarily appear mountainous terrain, including the part of Israel and Syria.The result also presents the horizontal precision estimated in Japan, India and Kazakhstan, which is slightly higher than the precision estimated in Israel and Syria. The regions with larger deviation of relative errors have apparent influence on horizontal accuracy assessment of GE’s imagery. Accuracy assessment may be affected by terrain features and the insignificant feature points over the study area. The results suggest that the most of horizontal accuracy of GE’s high resolution imagery over the most of study regions fulfills precision requirement of 1:50000 maps.