A new method for acquiring long-term high-precision spatial data on rural settlements

Accurate spatial data regarding rural settlements provides the basis for analyses of spatial evolution. Decrypted KeyHole military satellite images were used as a spatial data source in this study in order to assess historical rural settlements at high precision. The spatial data acquisition process used in this work involved three stages, interpretation from rural settlements, validation of results, and then resampling. We describe a new method to confirm validation samples in this article and use a confusion matrix to verify data accuracy. The Kappa value yielded in this approach was 0.97; the method described here can be used in the future for the acquisition of high-precision spatial data from historical rural settlements. • Decrypted KeyHole military satellite images were used as a data source to obtain high-precision information regarding historical rural settlements. • The new method proposed in this article was used to verify the accuracy of sample data and to solve the ongoing problem that historical image land use often cannot be verified. • Result accuracy was verified using functions in ArcGIS 10.4 to create accuracy assessment points, update them, and compute a confusion matrix.