Estimating urban impervious surface distribution with RS

As a key indicator of urbanization,the impervious surface has been widely used as a urban environmental indicator to estimate urban impervious surface distribution;we can reveal the further change of urban land cover/land use and urban expansion in Beijing.Four endmembers: low albedo,high albedo,vegetation,and soil were implemented through the constrained linear spectral mixture analysis(LSMA) using Landsat Thematic Mapper.In this paper,impervious surface fraction was estimated by analyzing low and high albedo endmembers.The results of this study reveal that estimative impervious surface distribution can be derived with a promising accuracy,the root mean square(RMS) error was 8.6% and correlation coefficient R2was 0.932,by comparing to the corresponding true impervious surface digitized through interpreting spot-5 images and the area of imperviousness measured from the digitized map.