Extraction of urban built-up areas in Shanghai based on night-time lighting data

Abstract

Compared to traditional multi-spectral information, nighttime light data has more intuitive features and is more sensitive to feedback on human-acquired trends such as urban sprawl and industrial development. Therefore, this paper uses Shanghai as the study area and combines the 30m resolution land use raster data with the monthly NPP-VIIRS data to determine the threshold value using the spatial comparison method of higher resolution image data. The threshold dichotomy was used to extract the urban built-up areas from the nighttime light images, and the error was only 0.85 when compared with the statistical data.