Estimating Urban Impervious Surfaces by Linear Spectral Mixture Analysis: A Case of Urban Area of Shanghai (2002-2008)

In recent years, impervious surface has emerged not only as an indicator of the degree of urbanization but also a major indicator of environmental quality. As one of the most important industry cities, Shanghai is rapidly increasing in population and area. The impervious surface expansion occurs through the encroachment into the adjacent and suburb land. Extracting information of impervious surface from satellite images allows one to monitor urban changes over time and integrate the environment management and urban planning activities [1], [2]. Estimating impervious surfaces from medium spatial resolution satellite images has therefore attracted more interests recently in remote sensing community.