A NEW VEGETATION INDEX FOR REMOTE SENSING

Global vegetation change is one of major global concerns. Remote sensing images provide an efficient and useful data source to estimate global vegetation covers, and a number of methods have been proposed to estimate them. Among them, the NDVI is one of the most popular indices, and it is_easy to calculate with simple image computing. However, this index is very much affected by the radiometric environment of sensing such as atmospheric conditions and the sun illumination angle. Therefore, it is not appropriate to apply the NDVI to investigate seasonal changes. This paper discusses these problems and proposes an alternative index, MODVI(Modified Vegetation Index), that is less affected by radiometric environment changes. An experiment was conducted to compare these two indices using temporal Landsat TM sub-scenes.