Balancing Land Surface’s Brightness-Shadowing and Spectral Reflectance to Enhance the Discrimination of Built-up Footprint from Surrounding Noise

Abstract

Recent evolutions of the geospatial technologies are more accurate in mapping and monitoring land use land cover, LULC, in different environments and at different spatial scales. However, some urban applications keep facing issues such as misclassification and other noise in unplanned cities with disorganized built-up and mixed housing material, and surrounded by a composed biophysical environment. This paper reports the processing leading to a new spectral index, that balances the land surface brightness temperature and spectral reflectance to accurately extract the built-up. The namely Brightness Adjusted Built-up Index, BABI, is proposed as a weighted ratio of Landsat OLI-TIRS bands. The methodology is based on a multi-perceptron layers, MLP, regression between a classified image and individually classified red, SWIR1, SWIR2 and TIR bands reclassified "1 = built-up; 0 = Non-Built-up", with an average r 2 =0.78.