Abstract
Accurate identification of water boundaries is of great significance to water resources surveys. Most water indexes have been designed for different districts and cannot be universally utilized in different regions and, in addition, they rely on atmospheric correction. A new water index, None-Radiation-Calibration Water Index (NRCWI), was constructed by Landsat OLI Band 3 (Green), Band 5 (NIR), and Band 6 (SWIR1), and was compared to the previous method, Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), Automated Water Extraction Index (AWEI). We evaluated the accuracy of four water index methods for classifying water in 30-m resolution Landsat 8 OLI imagery from the Bohai Sea Rim in China, which takes in a broad assortment of features including sea and coastline, lakes, rivers, man-made water features, and mountains (shadow water). The following outcomes were obtained: 1. The overall accuracy of NRCWI was 95.23%, which is higher than NDWI, MNDWI, AWEI; 2. The leakage error of NRCWI was 5.48%, the misclassification error was 6.15%, and it implies that the error of NRCWI was effected decrease; 3. NRCWI had the highest kappa coefficient in lakes, rivers, man-made waters, mountains, and other ground features, which means that the method can reach a high accuracy in case 2 water which is principally situated in the near shore, estuary and so on; 4. In the applicability study, the kappa values of NRCWI were 89.99% (OLI), 87.36% (ETM+), 87.33% (TM), and 81.20% (Sentinel-2 MSI). Overall, the NRCWI method performed the best, with the highest accuracy and the lowest leakage error, which may be useful in OLI, ETM+, and TM imagery.
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.