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Surface Water Area Extraction by Using Water Indices and DFPS Method Applied to Satellites Data

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Abstract

Satellite imagesare usedto extract and calculate surface water area and water resource features accurately. Water index and optimum threshold methods are essential for the extraction of surface water area. Various water indices have been developed during the past two decades, such as Normalized difference water index (NDWI), Modified normalized difference water index, Automated Water Extraction Index for shadow and non-shadow, Water Ration Index (WRI) and Normalized difference vegetation index. With application of each of these indices, the surface water area can be extracted by applying the respective threshold values for the indices and computed areas. The present study focuses on the comparing the accuracy of surface water area extraction for respective water indices and obtaining an optimal threshold value to separate water and other features from output images of indices using a Semi-automatic double-window flexible pace search (DFPS) method. The surface water areas of the Kaylana Lake (at Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India)have been extracted for different years with above stated indices and further compared with the extracted values by applying the polygon method on historical images received from Google Earth. The extracted surface water areas with polygon method on historical Google Earth images are 0.88 km2, 0.74 km2, 1.22 km2, 0.67 km2and 1.00 km2for the years 2002, 2008, 2010, 2015, 2019 respectively. The comparison of extracted output results using different indices clearly indicates that the Semi-Automatic DFPS method is the best method to obtain optimum threshold value and to classified water indices output. The final comparison of outputs of indices also shows that overall NDWI provided much better surface water area output results. This study method identifies water bodies using Landsat TM, Lansat ETM + , Landsat OLI, and Sentinel-2A imagery with high accuracy by using NDWI water index and DFPS optimum threshold calculation method.

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Fig. 1

Source Survey of India

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Abbreviations

DFPS:

Double windows flexible pace search method

NDWI:

Normalized difference water indices

MNDWI:

Modified normalized difference water indices

WRI:

Water ratio index

NDVI:

Normalized difference water indice

AWEI_sh:

Automated water extraction indices with shadow

AWEI_nsh:

Automated water extraction indices with non_shadow

TM:

Thematic mapper

ETM + :

Enhanced thematic mapper

OLI:

Operational land imager

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  1. Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, 247667, India

    Surendra Singh Choudhary & S. K. Ghosh

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Choudhary, S.S., Ghosh, S.K. Surface Water Area Extraction by Using Water Indices and DFPS Method Applied to Satellites Data. Sens Imaging 23, 33 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11220-022-00403-4

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