Use of impervious surface in urban land-use classification

Impervious surface has been recognized as a key indicator in assessing urban environments. However, accurate impervious surface extraction is still a challenge. Effectiveness of impervious surface in urban land-use classification has not been well addressed. This paper explored extraction of impervious surface information from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper data based on the integration of fraction images from linear spectral mixture analysis and land surface temperature. A new approach for urban land-use classification, based on the combined use of impervious surface and population density, was developed. Five urban land-use classes (i.e., low-, medium-, high-, and very-high-intensity residential areas, and commercial/industrial/transportation uses) were developed in the city of Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. Results showed that the integration of fraction images and surface temperature provided substantially improved impervious surface image. Accuracy assessment indicated that the root-mean-square error and system error yielded 9.22% and 5.68%, respectively, for the impervious surface image. The overall classification accuracy of 83.78% for five urban land-use classes was obtained.