Temporal mixture analysis for estimating impervious surface area from multi-temporal MODIS NDVI data in Japan

As a proxy measure of the human ecological footprint, impervious surface area (ISA) has recently become a key concept in the field of urban remote sensing, with a focus on estimation of the ISA at a city-scale by using Landsat-style satellite images. However, ISA estimation is also in demand in disciplines such as the environmental assessment and policy making at a national scale. This paper proposes a new method for estimating the ISA fraction in Japan based on a temporal mixture analysis (TMA) technique. The required inputs for the proposed method are rearranged MODIS NDVI time-series datasets at the temporal stable zone (i.e., the first to the sixth largest NDVI values in a year). Three ISA distribution maps obtained from Landsat-5 TM data were used as reference maps to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results showed that the proposed TMA-based method achieved a large reduction in the effects of endmember variability compared with the previous methods (e.g., SMA and NSMA), and thus the new method has promising accuracy for estimating ISA in Japan. The overall root mean square error (RMSE) of the proposed method was 8.7%, with a coefficient of determination of 0.86, and there was no obvious underestimation or overestimation for the whole ISA range.