Using NBUI to Extract Built-up Area in Iaşi Municipality Area, Romania

Urban built-up areas are vast stretches of constructed areas equipped with basic public facilities. Urban built-up area information is necessary in numerous applications of land use planning and management. The detection and calculation of the built-up area with the highest possible accuracy is of big importance in agricultural urban and suburban studies. Urban built-up area extraction from Landsat data, which has moderate spatial resolution, is challenging because of important intraurban heterogeneity and spectral confusion between other landcover types. In this paper is used a method to extract urban built-up surface from Landsat Thematic Mapper and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus data and determines urban area changes between 1994 to 2016 of Iaşi Municipal Area of Romania. The Enhanced Built-Up Bareness Index (EBBI), Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI) were selected, to define three major urban landuse (LU) classes: built-up and barren or bare land, vegetation and open waterbody. In this paper built-up area was extracted as difference between indices EBBI, SAVI, MNDWI to eliminate water noises and vegetation, the obtained index image was spectrally sectioned to separate built-up area from the nonurban built-up lands. The obtained index is used to extract built-up area for 1994 and 2016 periods. Built-up area showed an overall growth about 203% in a span of 22 years. The accuracy of this index is 88.72%.