Estimating Impervious Surface Fraction of Tanchon Watershed Using Spectral Mixture Analysis

Increasing of impervious surface resulting from urban development has negative impacts on urban environment. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to estimate and quantify the temporal and spatial aspects of impervious area for study of urban environment. In many cases, conventional image classification methods have been used for analysis of impervious surface fraction. However, the conventional classification methods have shortcoming in estimating impervious surface. The DN value of the each pixel in imagery is mixed result of spectral character of various objects which exist in surface. But conventional image classification methods force each pixel to be allocated only one class. And also after land cover classification, it is requisite to additional work of calculating impervious percentage value in each class item. This study used the spectral mixture analysis to overcome this weakness of the conventional classification methods. Four endmembers, vegetation, soil, low albedo and high albedo were selected to compose pure land cover objects. Impervious surface fraction was estimated by adding low albedo and high albedo. The study area is the Tanchon watershed which has been rapidly changed by the intensive development of housing. Landsat imagery from 1988, 1994 to 2001 was used to estimate impervious surface fraction. The results of this study show that impervious surface fraction increased from 15.6% in 1988, 20.1% in 1994 to 24% in 2001. Results indicate that impervious surface fraction can be estimated by spectral mixture analysis with promising accuracy.