An Effective Urbanized Area Monitoring Method Using Vegetation Indices

Urban growth management is essential for sustainable urban growth. Monitoring physical urban built-up area is a task of great significance to manage urban growth. Detecting urbanized area is essential for monitoring urbanized area. Although image classifications using satellite imagery are among the conventional methods for detecting urbanized area, they requires very tedious and hard work, especially if time-series remote sensing data have to be processed. In this paper, we propose an effective urbanized area detecting method based on normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized difference built-up index (NDBI). To verify the proposed method, we extract urbanized area using two methods; one is conventional supervised classification method and the other is the proposed method. Experiments shows that two methods are consistent with 98% in 1998, 99.3% in 2000, namely the consistency of two methods is very high. Because the proposed method requires no more process without band operations, it can reduce time and effort. Compared with the supervised classification method, the proposed method using vegetation indices can serve as quick and efficient alternatives for detecting urbanized area.