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International Journal of Remote Sensing
Vol. 29, No. 14, 20 July 2008, 4269–4276

Letter

A new index for delineating built-up land features in satellite imagery

H. XU*
College of Environment and Resources, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350108,
China

(Received 16 October 2007; in final form 2 February 2008 )

A new index derived from existing indices – an index-based built-up index (IBI) –
is proposed for the rapid extraction of built-up land features in satellite imagery.
The IBI is distinguished from conventional indices by its first-time use of
thematic index-derived bands to construct an index rather than by using original
image bands. The three thematic indices used in constructing the IBI are the soil
adjusted vegetation index (SAVI), the modified normalized difference water
index (MNDWI) and the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI).
Respectively, these represent the three major urban components of vegetation,
water and built-up land. The new index has been verified using the Landsat
ETM + image of Fuzhou City in southeastern China. The result shows that the
IBI can significantly enhance the built-up land feature while effectively
suppressing background noise. A statistical analysis indicates that the IBI
possesses a positive correlation with land surface temperature, but negative
correlations with the NDVI and the MNDWI.

1. Introduction
Rapid development of urban areas has witnessed replacement of natural vegetation
cover with buildings and paved surfaces. This has brought about many negative
environmental repercussions to the world, for example, less precipitation, more
dryness and higher temperatures (Kaufmann et al. 2007), which contribute greatly
to global warming. The ability to monitor the built-up land dynamics and changes in
the urban extent in a timely and cost-effective manner is highly desirable for local
communities and decision makers alike. Fortunately, satellite remote sensing
technology offers considerable promise to meet this requirement and satellite
imagery has been used to discriminate built-up lands from non-built-up lands for the
last few decades. A popular method for the definition of built-up land areas began
with conventional multi-spectral classification. However, this may not produce
satisfactory accuracy, normally less than 80%, due to spectral confusion of the
heterogeneous built-up land class. Therefore, many studies have not only used a
single classification method to extract the built-up lands, but have also combined
different methods to improve the extraction. Masek et al. (2000) identified urban
built-up lands in the metropolitan Washington DC area, based on a normalized
difference vegetation index (NDVI) differencing approach with the assistance of an
unsupervised classification and achieved an overall accuracy of 85%. Xu (2002) and
Xian and Crane (2005) used logic tree algorithms to extract built-up land

*Corresponding author. Email: fdy@public.fz.fj.cn

International Journal of Remote Sensing
ISSN 0143-1161 print/ISSN 1366-5901 online # 2008 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals 转载
DOI: 10.1080/01431160802039957
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4270 H. Xu

information, but were only able to achieve an accuracy of around 85%. To date,
there are few simple processes of automatically mapping built-up lands, such as
using indices. The normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) of Zha et al. (2003)
is the only one proposed for this purpose. The development of the index was based
on the spectral response of built-up lands that have higher reflectance in the middle
infrared (MIR) wavelength range (such as TM 5), than in the near infrared (NIR)
wavelength range (see equation (1) below). However, studies have shown that the
reflectance for certain types of vegetation over the band pass of TM 5 increased as
leaf water content decreased (Cibula et al. 1992, Gao 1996), and the drier vegetation
can even have a higher reflectance in the MIR wavelength range than in the NIR
range (Gao 1996). Therefore, the extracted built-up land information using the
NDBI is often mixed with plant noise, and Zha et al. (2003) had to further use the
NDVI to filter out the noise. Obviously, simply using the original spectral bands to
construct an index is not applicable for the enhancement of built-up land due to its
complex spectral features. Therefore, the author proposes an index-based built-up
index (IBI) with the aim to provide a simple, but effective, method to enhance built-
up land presence in satellite imagery.

2. Construction of the IBI using thematic index-derived bands

An urban area is a complex ecosystem composed of heterogeneous materials.
Nevertheless, based on some generalizing features, Ridd (1995) could still divide the
urban ecosystem into three components, green vegetation, impervious surface
material and exposed soil, and accordingly created a V-I-S model. However,
ignoring open water in the V-I-S model has led to inconvenience for many later
urban studies based on this model, which had to mask out water information
beforehand (Wu and Murray 2003). Accordingly, open water is taken into
consideration in this study; this is because of not only the inconvenience mentioned
above, but also the importance of water in the urban ecosystem. Consequently, the
urban land-use was grouped into three other generalizing categories: built-up land,
vegetation and open water. Based on these three components, three thematic indices,
the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), the soil adjusted vegetation index
(SAVI) and the modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI, Xu 2006),
were selected to represent the three major land-use classes respectively. The
MNDWI modifies the normalized difference water index (NDWI) of McFeeters
(1996) by substitution of a middle infrared band, such as TM 5 for the NIR band
used in the NDWI. As a result, the MNDWI has an advantage over the NDWI by
removing built-up land noise when applied to open water enhancement.
The three selected indices are expressed as:

ðMIR{NIRÞ
NDBI~ , ð1Þ
ðMIRzNIRÞ

ðNIR{RedÞð1zl Þ
SAVI~ ð2Þ
ðNIRzRedzl Þ
and
ðGreen{MIRÞ
MNDWI~ , ð3Þ
ðGreenzMIRÞ
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Remote Sensing Letters 4271

where MIR is a middle infrared band such as TM 5, NIR is a near infrared band
such as TM 4, Red is a red band such as TM 3 and Green is a green band such as
TM 2; l is a correction factor ranging from 0 for very high plant densities to 1 for
very low plant densities. The selection of the SAVI instead of the NDVI is because
the SAVI is more sensitive than the NDVI in detecting vegetation in the low-plant
covered areas such as urban areas. The SAVI can work in the area with plant cover
as low as 15%, while the NDVI can only work effectively in the area with plant cover
above 30% (Ray 2006). Therefore, the SAVI is more suitable for the urban area.
However, in the area where the plant cover is more than 30%, the NDVI can be
used:
ðNIR{RedÞ
NDVI~ : ð4Þ
ðNIRzRedÞ

After producing SAVI, MNDWI, and NDBI images, a new image was created,
which used these three new images as three bands. The change from the original
multi-band image into the three-thematic-band image largely reduces redundancy
between original multi-spectral bands, and the three new bands are negatively
correlated with each other (see table 1). Consequently, the spectral clusters of the
three major urban components are well separated (see figure 1 and table 2).
Table 2 shows the mean and standard deviation (std. dev.) values of the three
urban land-use classes in the new three-index-derived images. A unique feature is
that the mean value of built-up land is greater than those of vegetation and water in
the NDBI band. Furthermore, the mean value of built-up land in the NDBI band
exceeds its values in the SAVI band and the MNDWI band. According to these
distinct features, the IBI can be created as follows:
½NDBI{ðSAVIzMNDWIÞ=2

IBI~ : ð5Þ
½NDBIzðSAVIzMNDWIÞ=2

The index can enhance the built-up land feature easily because the subtraction of
the SAVI band and the MNDWI band from the NDBI band will result in positive
values for built-up land pixels only. The index takes advantage of the condition
where the features with higher NDBI values but lower SAVI and MNDWI values
will be enhanced. Obviously, the IBI is a normalized difference index and thus has
such features as: (1) a ratio-based index, (2) values ranging from 21 to + 1 and (3)
enhanced information has positive values, while the suppressed background noise
generally has zero to negative values. Dividing by two in the equation is to avoid
getting too small values of IBI. Before calculating the IBI using equation (5), the

Table 1. Comparison of correlation values between the three new bands and the three
original ETM + bands representing the visual light band group, the near infrared band and
the middle infrared band group, respectively.

SAVI NDBI MNDWI ETM + ETM + ETM +

band band band band 3 band 4 band 5
SAVI band 1.000 20.110 20.820 ETM + band 3 1.000 20.086 0.564
NDBI band 20.110 1.000 20.079 ETM + band 4 20.086 1.000 0.673
MNDWI band 20.820 20.079 1.000 ETM + band 5 0.564 0.673 1.000
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4272 H. Xu

Figure 1. Scatter plot of the three major urban land-use classes.

values of the NDVI, the NDBI and the MNDWI should be added to 1 or rescaled
within 0–255 to convert negative values of the indices into positive values.
The IBI is distinguished from conventional indices by its first-time use of thematic
index-derived bands, instead of original image bands, to construct an index. When
the NDVI is used instead of the SAVI in equation (5), the IBI can be rewritten,
based on equations (1), (3), (4) and (5), as:
2MIR=ðMIRzNIRÞ{½NIR=ðNIRzRedÞzGreen=ðGreenzMIRÞ

IBI~ ð6Þ
2MIR=ðMIRzNIRÞz½NIR=ðNIRzRedÞzGreen=ðGreenzMIRÞ

Equation (6) allows the use of the IBI in just ‘one touch’ without having to make
three indices before calculating the IBI.

3. Validation of IBI
The IBI has been verified using the Landsat ETM + image of Fuzhou City in
southeastern China (see figure 2(a)), acquired on 29 May 2003. Even if a raw image
can be directly used for computing the IBI, the image was radiometrically corrected
before the calculation to avoid a dataset-specific result. The correction employed the

Figure 2. Landsat ETM + image of Fuzhou City: (a) false colour image (RGB:432), (b) IBI
image, enhanced built-up land features are in a light-grey to white tone and suppressed
background noise is in a dark-grey to black shade and (c) built-up land extraction image.
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Remote Sensing Letters 4273

Table 2. Statistics of the three main urban land-use classes of the new three-band image.

SAVI NDBI MNDWI

Vegetation Mean 0.366 20.223 20.660
Std. dev. 0.101 0.046 0.103
Built-up land Mean 20.037 0.298 20.401
Std. dev. 0.017 0.029 0.050
Water Mean 20.197 20.180 0.681
Std. dev. 0.037 0.119 0.082

method presented by Lowry et al. (2004), which is based on the algorithm of

Chander and Markham (2003) with the addition of an atmospheric correction
model suggested by Chavez (1996). Figure 2(b) is the IBI image of the city derived
from the radiometrically corrected image. In the IBI image, the built-up land
features are greatly enhanced with a light grey to white tone, while vegetation and
water are considerably suppressed with a dark-grey to black shade. This is owing to
the enlargement of the contrast between built-up land and the other two classes by
the IBI. Table 3 shows that the built-up land has positive values, while the vegetation
and water are all in negative values in the IBI image.
The validation of the IBI is carried out by the quantitative assessment of the
accuracy for the extracted urban built-up land features. To extract urban built-up
land features from the IBI image, a threshold (0.013) was manually determined. The
pixels with values greater than the threshold are built-up land and assigned a value
of 1, while the pixels with values equal or less than the threshold are non-built-up
land and assigned a value of 0. Thus, the resultant image is a binary image, only
showing the extracted built-up land information. Non-urban areas were further
masked out using a vector polygon defining the urban outline and only the built-up
lands inside the urban region were retained as urban built-up lands (see figure 2(c)).
A finer spatial resolution SPOT 5 HI image was used as a reference dataset, with
which the extracted result was compared. The image is a 10 m multi-spectral image
of Fuzhou area acquired on 13 December 2003. A random sampling method was
used and 310 pixels were sampled. The assessment shows that the overall accuracy is
96.77% with a kappa coefficient of 0.9307 (table 4). The background noise, such as
river channels, lakes and vegetations, is excluded (figure 2(c)).
Further validation of the IBI is carried out by examining the relationships of the
new index with the vegetation index (NDVI), the water index (MNDWI) and the
land surface temperature (LST), respectively, by regression analysis. To objectively
examine the relationships, a random sampling method with a large sampling
rectangle was used (27 900 pixels were sampled). The result shows that the IBI has a
positive correlation with the LST, but negative correlations with the NDVI and
MNDWI (see figure 3). This suggests that the increase in built-up land is responsible

Table 3. Statistics of the three main urban land-use classes of the IBI image.

Built-up land Water Vegetation

Minimum 0.018 20.517 20.220
Maximum 0.308 20.072 20.048
Mean 0.244 20.302 20.155
Std. dev. 0.026 0.097 0.034
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4274 H. Xu

Table 4. Accuracy assessment.

Built-up land Non-built-up land Total User’s accuracy

Built-up land 191 1 192 99.48%
Non-built-up land 9 109 118 92.37%
Total 200 110 310
Producer’s accuracy 95.5% 99.09%
Overall accuracy 96.77% kappa 0.9307

for a raise in land surface temperature and a decrease in water and vegetation
covers.
The scatter plot of the IBI versus the MNDWI shows a characteristic triangular-
shaped envelope of pixels (figure 3(c)). The correlation between the IBI and the
MNDWI is not as strong as the other two because the random sampling procedure
sampled not only built-up land and water pixels, but also many vegetation pixels.
The vegetation pixels have low values in both IBI and MNDWI. As a result, their

Figure 3. Scatter plots showing the relationship of the IBI with the LST, the NDVI and the
MNDWI.
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Remote Sensing Letters 4275

points accumulate in the lower left part of the scatter plot and thus cause the lowering of
the correlation between the IBI and the MNDWI. Nevertheless, a declined and sharply
defined upper edge of the triangular envelope can be seen in the figure. This may
represent the real relationship between the IBI and the MNDWI, implying a strong
negative correlation between the two indices. This upper edge may correspond to the
maximum water proportion at a given level of built-up land cover. In figure 3(b), the
points scattered in the lower left part of the scatter plot represent pure water or water-
dominated pixels, which have low values in both the IBI and the NDVI, and therefore
have also lowered the correlation between the IBI and the NDVI to some extent.
Finally, the relationship between the IBI, the NDVI and the MNDWI can be further
examined in a three-dimensional spectral feature space (figure 3(d)). This reveals a
saddle-shaped scatter plot, the top of which is composed of built-up land-dominated
pixels, while the two feet represent water and vegetation pixels, respectively.

4. Conclusions
Many studies have demonstrated that the built-up land class cannot be efficiently
enhanced using an index constructed simply of original multi-spectral bands because
the class has a heterogeneous characteristic. The proposed IBI is distinguished from
conventional indices by the first-time use of thematic index-derived bands to
construct an index, rather than by using original image bands. The new image,
composed of three thematic-index bands, the SAVI, the NDBI and the MNDWI,
can greatly reduce the data dimensionality and redundancy of the original multi-
spectral image and thus substantially avoids the spectral confusion between land-use
classes. Consequently, the IBI can effectively suppress background noise while
retaining built-up land features in satellite imagery.

Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(no. 40371107) and the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province, China
(no. 2007J0132).

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