Comparison of NDVI and EVI Indices in Detection of Vegetation Changes

Vegetation indices have been developed to characterize and extract the Earth s vegetation cover from space using satellite images. In this study, the effectiveness of NDVI and EVI indices was evaluated for vegetation change detection at four test sites in different environmental conditions in Iran and Italy. Landsat imagery as one the most widely used sources of data in remote sensing was used for this purpose. Overall accuracy, kappa coefficient, and omission and commission errors were calculated to assess accuracy of the resulting change maps. The results indicated superiority and higher performance of NDVI compared to EVI for detection of vegetation changes. In most test sites, classification accuracy of NDVI was higher than EVI. In conclusion, the study demonstrated great performance of NDVI and EVI indices, especially NDVI for monitoring vegetation changes at different environmental conditions