Creating random points in vectorized raster in ArcGIS for Desktop?

Question

Im conducting an accraucy assessment of an NLCD map. First, I wanted to create a few points in each land cover category in Arc, convert it to kml format, then pull it into Google Earth to make sure the land covers will be distinguishable.

Since the NLCD is a raster, I converted each individual land cover into a seperate vector. However, when I use the Create Random Points tool under Data Management, the result is a ton of points covering the vectorized raster (even though I only specified 5). What gives?

Is this because there are multiple polygons that were created within each vectorized raster layer?

Answer 1

The documentation on this tool dictates that the field number of points is used to determine the number of random points per feature in the given layer. So it does appear that using the input of 5 would yield 5 random points per vector grid cell. That is assuming that your vector grid is composed of polygons and not lines. An easy way to check this would be to zoom in and count the number of points in a few cells to see if they all contain 5 points. If you would like just five points over the whole vector grid use the field constraining extent instead and set the extent to that of the vector layer. Some more documentation on this tool can be found at http://help.arcgis.com/En/Arcgisdesktop/10.0/Help/index.html#//00170000002r000000.