Combining Water Indices for Water and Background Threshold in Landsat Image

Accurate and frequent update of surface water has been made possible by remote sensing technology. Index methods are mostly used for surface water estimation which separates the water from background based on a threshold value. Generally threshold is a fixed value but can be challenging in case of shades, hills, forest and urban areas. In such case, determination of threshold is done manually which is subjective and areal variation. In order to widen the difference between water and background with easier threshold selection, a combination of multiple water indices can be used. This could widen the gap between classes and the threshold sensitivity can be minimized. In this study, we summed Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified NDWI, Water Ratio Index and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index to form a new raster and explore the efficiency of thresholding compared to individual indices on Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) image of Nepal. The combined index showed much better separation of water with background and can be further used for automated binary classification of surface water. The process could be very useful in mapping surface water accurately.