scholarly journals Ensembles of multiple spectral water indices for improving surface water classification

Author(s):  
Zhaofei Wen ◽  
Ce Zhang ◽  
Guofan Shao ◽  
Shengjun Wu ◽  
Peter M. Atkinson
Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 2580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tri Acharya ◽  
Anoj Subedi ◽  
Dong Lee

Accurate and frequent updates of surface water have been made possible by remote sensing technology. Index methods are mostly used for surface water estimation which separates the water from the background based on a threshold value. Generally, the threshold is a fixed value, but can be challenging in the case of environmental noise, such as shadow, forest, built-up areas, snow, and clouds. One such challenging scene can be found in Nepal where no such evaluation has been done. Taking that in consideration, this study evaluates the performance of the most widely used water indices: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified NDWI (MNDWI), and Automated Water Extraction Index (AWEI) in a Landsat 8 scene of Nepal. The scene, ranging from 60 m to 8848 m, contains various types of water bodies found in Nepal with different forms of environmental noise. The evaluation was conducted based on measures from a confusion matrix derived using validation points. Comparing visually and quantitatively, not a single method was able to extract surface water in the entire scene with better accuracy. Upon selecting optimum thresholds, the overall accuracy (OA) and kappa coefficient (kappa) was improved, but not satisfactory. NDVI and NDWI showed better results for only pure water pixels, whereas MNDWI and AWEI were unable to reject snow cover and shadows. Combining NDVI with NDWI and AWEI with shadow improved the accuracy but inherited the NDWI and AWEI characteristics. Segmenting the test scene with elevations above and below 665 m, and using NDVI and NDWI for detecting water, resulted in an OA of 0.9638 and kappa of 0.8979. The accuracy can be further improved with a smaller interval of categorical characteristics in one or multiple scenes.


Water ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yan Zhou ◽  
Jinwei Dong ◽  
Xiangming Xiao ◽  
Tong Xiao ◽  
Zhiqi Yang ◽  
...  

Open surface water bodies play an important role in agricultural and industrial production, and are susceptible to climate change and human activities. Remote sensing data has been increasingly used to map open surface water bodies at local, regional, and global scales. In addition to image statistics-based supervised and unsupervised classifiers, spectral index- and threshold-based approaches have also been widely used. Many water indices have been proposed to identify surface water bodies; however, the differences in performances of these water indices as well as different sensors on water body mapping are not well documented. In this study, we reviewed and compared existing open surface water body mapping approaches based on six widely-used water indices, including the tasseled cap wetness index (TCW), normalized difference water index (NDWI), modified normalized difference water index (mNDWI), sum of near infrared and two shortwave infrared bands (Sum457), automated water extraction index (AWEI), land surface water index (LSWI), as well as three medium resolution sensors (Landsat 7 ETM+, Landsat 8 OLI, and Sentinel-2 MSI). A case region in the Poyang Lake Basin, China, was selected to examine the accuracies of the open surface water body maps from the 27 combinations of different algorithms and sensors. The results showed that generally all the algorithms had reasonably high accuracies with Kappa Coefficients ranging from 0.77 to 0.92. The NDWI-based algorithms performed slightly better than the algorithms based on other water indices in the study area, which could be related to the pure water body dominance in the region, while the sensitivities of water indices could differ for various water body conditions. The resultant maps from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 data had higher overall accuracies than those from Landsat 7. Specifically, all three sensors had similar producer accuracies while Landsat 7 based results had a lower user accuracy. This study demonstrates the improved performance in Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 for open surface water body mapping efforts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 219 ◽  
pp. 259-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiucheng Yang ◽  
Qiming Qin ◽  
Pierre Grussenmeyer ◽  
Mathieu Koehl

Proceedings ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tri Dev Acharya ◽  
Anoj Subedi ◽  
He Huang ◽  
Dong Ha Lee

With over 6000 rivers and 5358 lakes, surface water is one of the most important resources in Nepal. However, the quantity and quality of Nepal’s rivers and lakes are decreasing due to human activities and climate change. Therefore, the monitoring and estimation of surface water is an essential task. In Nepal, surface water has different characteristics such as varying temperature, turbidity, depth, and vegetation cover, for which remote sensing technology plays a vital role. Single or multiple water index methods have been applied in the classification of surface water with satisfactory results. In recent years, machine learning methods with training datasets, have been outperforming different traditional methods. In this study, we tried to use satellite images from Landsat 8 to classify surface water in Nepal. Input of Landsat bands and ground truth from high resolution images available form Google Earth is used, and their performance is evaluated based on overall accuracy. The study will be will helpful to select optimum machine learning methods for surface water classification and therefore, monitoring and management of surface water in Nepal.


Data ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Kalacska ◽  
Oliver Lucanus ◽  
Leandro Sousa ◽  
J. Pablo Arroyo-Mora

We describe a new high spatial resolution surface water classification dataset generated for the Xingu river, Brazil, from its confluence with the Iriri river to the Pimental dam prior to construction of the Belo Monte hydropower complex, and after its operationalization. This river is well-known for its exceptionally high diversity and endemism in ichthyofauna. Pre-existing datasets generated from moderate resolution satellite imagery (e.g., 30 m) do not adequately capture the extent of the river. Accurate measurements of water extent are important for a range of applications utilizing surface water data, including greenhouse gas emission estimation, land cover change mapping, and habitat loss/change estimates, among others. We generated the new classifications from RapidEye imagery (5 m pixel size) for 2011 and PlanteScope imagery (3 m pixel size) for 2019 using a Geographic Object Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) approach.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 2163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan D. Kyzivat ◽  
Laurence C. Smith ◽  
Lincoln H. Pitcher ◽  
Jessica V. Fayne ◽  
Sarah W. Cooley ◽  
...  

The airborne AirSWOT instrument suite, consisting of an interferometric Ka-band synthetic aperture radar and color-infrared (CIR) camera, was deployed to northern North America in July and August 2017 as part of the NASA Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE). We present validated, open (i.e., vegetation-free) surface water masks produced from high-resolution (1 m), co-registered AirSWOT CIR imagery using a semi-automated, object-based water classification. The imagery and resulting high-resolution water masks are available as open-access datasets and support interpretation of AirSWOT radar and other coincident ABoVE image products, including LVIS, UAVSAR, AIRMOSS, AVIRIS-NG, and CFIS. These synergies offer promising potential for multi-sensor analysis of Arctic-Boreal surface water bodies. In total, 3167 km2 of open surface water were mapped from 23,380 km2 of flight lines spanning 23 degrees of latitude and broad environmental gradients. Detected water body sizes range from 0.00004 km2 (40 m2) to 15 km2. Power-law extrapolations are commonly used to estimate the abundance of small lakes from coarser resolution imagery, and our mapped water bodies followed power-law distributions, but only for water bodies greater than 0.34 (±0.13) km2 in area. For water bodies exceeding this size threshold, the coefficients of power-law fits vary for different Arctic-Boreal physiographic terrains (wetland, prairie pothole, lowland river valley, thermokarst, and Canadian Shield). Thus, direct mapping using high-resolution imagery remains the most accurate way to estimate the abundance of small surface water bodies. We conclude that empirical scaling relationships, useful for estimating total trace gas exchange and aquatic habitats on Arctic-Boreal landscapes, are uniquely enabled by high-resolution AirSWOT-like mappings and automated detection methods such as those developed here.


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