Developing a novel topography - adjusted vegetation index (TAVI) for rugged area

Numerous vegetation indexes have been developed for assessing vegetation characteristics and are still of increasing importance in environmental application of remote sensing. However, few of them are targeted to reduce topographic effects in rugged area. A novel topography-adjusted vegetation index (TAVI) is presented in this paper by combination of near-infrared and red wavebands data with topography adjusting coefficient without digital elevation model (DEM) data. The validity of TAVI is illustrated with a case study in Changting county, a mountainous area in southeast of China. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively eliminate topographic effects caused by rugged terrain. The slope of linear regression equation of TAVI - the solar incidence cosine, and the correlation coefficient between them are only around 0.01 respectively. It also indicates that this topography-adjusted vegetation index could be applied in other mountainous areas.