CHUNYANG HE^1,2,*, PEIJUN SHI¹, DINGYONG XIE² and

YUANYUAN ZHAO^1,2

1      State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

2       College of Resources Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China

 

Remote sensing images are useful for monitoring the spatial distribution and growth of urban built-up areas because they can provide timely and synoptic views of urban land cover. Although the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) is useful to map urban built-up areas, it still has some limitations. This study sought to improve the NDBI by using a semiautomatic segmentation approach. The proposed approach had more than 20% higher overall accuracy than the original method when both were implemented simultaneously at the National Olympic Park (NOP), Beijing, China. One reason for the improvement is that the proposed NDBI approach separates urban areas from barren and bare land to some extent. More importantly, the proposed method eliminates the original assumption that a positive NDBI value should indicate built-up areas and a positive normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) value should indicate vegetation. The new method has improved universality and lower commission error compared with the original method.

 

*Corresponding author. Email: hcy@bnu.edu.cn

(Received 20 December 2009; in final form 26 March 2010)