Detection of impervious surface change with multitemporal Landsat images in an urban–rural frontier

Mapping and monitoring impervious surface dynamic change in a complex urban–rural frontier with medium or coarse spatial resolution images is a challenge due to the mixed pixel problem and the spectral confusion between impervious surfaces and other non-vegetation land covers. This research selected Lucas do Rio Verde County in Mato Grosso State, Brazil as a case study to improve impervious surface estimation performance by the integrated use of Landsat and QuickBird images and to monitor impervious surface change by analyzing the normalized multitemporal Landsat-derived fractional impervious surfaces. This research demonstrates the importance of two-step calibrations. The first step is to calibrate the Landsat-derived fraction impervious surface values through the established regression model based on the QuickBird-derived impervious surface image in 2008. The second step is to conduct the normalization between the calibrated 2008 impervious surface image with other dates of impervious surface images. This research indicates that the per-pixel based method overestimates the impervious surface area in the urban–rural frontier by 50%–60%. In order to accurately estimate impervious surface area, it is necessary to map the fractional impervious surface image and further calibrate the estimates with high spatial resolution images. Also normalization of the multitemporal fractional impervious surface images is needed to reduce the impacts from different environmental conditions, in order to effectively detect the impervious surface dynamic change in a complex urban–rural frontier. The procedure developed in this paper for mapping and monitoring impervious surface area is especially valuable in urban–rural frontiers where multitemporal Landsat images are difficult to be used for accurately extracting impervious surface features based on traditional per-pixel based classification methods as they cannot effectively handle the mixed pixel problem.