Impervious surface extraction based on different methods from multiple spatial resolution images: a comprehensive comparison

Abstract

Many efforts have been devoted to extracting impervious surfaces based on different methods from multiple spatial resolution images. Differences in extraction methods and spatial resolutions are significant and have led to discrepant performances in terms of the impervious surface extraction accuracy. However, which extraction method is more suitable for which kind of spatial resolution image in practice is poorly understood. This study systematically compared the performances of 12 methods of impervious surface extraction for four spatial resolution images (i.e. Landsat 8 [30 m], Sentinel-2A [20 m], Sentinel-2A [10 m], and Gaofen-2 [4 m]) in three testing areas. The results indicated that for the medium-spatial resolutions of 30 and 20 m, the support vector machine (SVM) method was considered as the optimal classification method with the highest accuracy of impervious surface extraction. For the high-spatial resolutions of 10 and 4 m, the object based image analysis (OBIA) method obtained the highest accuracy of the impervious surface distribution. Furthermore, the perpendicular impervious surface index (PISI) outperformed the other indices in obtaining the impervious surface distribution, with the highest accuracy for four spatial resolution images. These comprehensive assessments can provide a valuable guidance for future impervious surface extraction from different spatial resolutions.