Mapping Urban Extent Using Luojia 1-01 Nighttime Light Imagery

Area of Science:

• Remote Sensing
• Urban Studies
• Geospatial Analysis

Background:

• Nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing is crucial for monitoring human activities and urban development.
• Previous NTL data sources have limitations in spatial resolution, impacting detailed urban extent mapping.
• The Luojia 1-01 satellite provides a novel, high-resolution NTL dataset.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of Luojia 1-01 (LJ1-01) NTL data for urban extent extraction.
• To compare different methods (HSI, STS, SVM) for urban area mapping using NTL imagery.
• To assess the performance of LJ1-01 data against VIIRS NTL data.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Luojia 1-01 (130 m resolution) and VIIRS NTL imagery.
• Applied and compared Human Settlement Index (HSI), Simple Thresholding Segmentation (STS), and SVM supervised classification.
• Conducted accuracy assessments using Kappa Coefficient to evaluate urban extent extraction results.

Main Results:

• The HSI method with LJ1-01 data yielded the highest Kappa Coefficient (0.834), indicating superior performance.
• LJ1-01 data generally outperformed VIIRS data across all tested methods.
• The higher resolution and richer spatial information of LJ1-01 data proved beneficial for urban identification.

Conclusions:

• Luojia 1-01 nighttime light data significantly enhances the accuracy of urban extent extraction.
• The HSI method is highly effective for mapping urban areas using high-resolution NTL data.
• High-resolution NTL imagery is a valuable tool for improving the precision of urban monitoring and analysis.