Characteristics of Multi-Spatial Resolution Satellite Images for the Extraction of Urban Environmental Information

The coefficients of variation obtained from three typical vegetation indices of eight levels of multi-spatial resolution images in urban areas were employed to identify the optimum spatial resolution in terms of maintaining information quality. These multi-spatial resolution images were prepared by degrading 1 meter simulated, 16 meter ADEOS/AVNIR, and 30 meter Landsat-TM images. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Perpendicular Vegetation Index (PVI) and Soil Adjusted Ratio Vegetation Index (SARVI) were applied to reduce data redundancy and compare the characteristics of multi-spatial resolution image of vegetation indices. The threshold point on the curve of the coefficient of variation was defined as the optimum resolution level for the analysis with multi-spatial resolution image sets. Also, the results from the image segmentation approach of region growing to extract man-made features were compared with these multi-spatial resolution image sets.