Extract residential areas automatically by New Built-up Index

Land covers in urban areas trend to change more drastically over a short period of time than elsewhere because of incessant urbanization. These changes are ideally monitored and detected from remotely sensed images as they are relatively up-to-date and give a panoramic view. In this paper we propose a new method based on New Built-up Index (NBI) to automate the process of mapping residential areas. The unique spectral response of land covers is most distinctive from one another for each cover in band 3, 4, 5. It takes advantage of the unique spectral response of residential areas and other land covers. This method has been successfully applied to extract the residential areas in Changzhou City, Jiangsu Province of China as a representative of plain areas by manipulating the spectral bands of TM imagery in 2007. The mapping results at a high accuracy. It acquires a high accuracy than NDBI. So it can serve as a worthwhile alternative for quickly extracting.