Mapping and assessing of urban impervious areas using multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis: a case study in the city of Tampa, Florida

The advance in remote sensing technology makes people easily assess urban growth. In this study, a multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) was examined in a sub-pixel analysis of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery to map three physical components of urban land cover (LC): impervious surface, vegetation and soil, and compared with a traditional spectral mixture analysis (SMA) in mapping the physical components. A comparative analysis of the impervious surface areas (ISA) mapped with MESMA and SMA indicates that MESMA produced more accurately results of mapping urban physical components than those by SMA. With the multiyear Landsat TM data, we quantified sub-pixel percentage of ISA and the percentage of ISA changes to assess urban growth in Tampa, FL during the past 20years. The experimental results demonstrate that MESMA approach is effective in mapping and monitoring urban land use/LC changes using moderate-resolution multispectral imagery at a sub-pixel level.