INTERPRETATION OF WATER INDICES FOR SHORELINE EXTRACTION FROM LANDSAT 8 OLI DATA ON THE SOUTHWEST COAST OF VIETNAM

Abstract

The paper presents results of analysis of water indices using remote sensing data to extract an instantaneous shoreline at the time of image acquisition on the southwest coast of Vietnam. The water indices as NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index), MNDWI (Modified Normalized Difference Water Index), and AWEI (Automated Water Extraction Index) were calculated from Landsat 8 OLI imagery. Then, an extracted distribution histogram of water indices’ values in the study area was used to separate the land from the sea. The position having abnormal frequency of pixels on the histogram is the threshold value to determine the boundary of land and water, and it is considered the shoreline. The study showed the threshold values of NDWI, MNDWI and AWEI which were defined at 0.12, 0.17 and 0.18 respectively. The precision of shoreline extraction from each respective water index was verified by field survey data using Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) methods. The verified results showed that MAE and MSE of the shorelines extracted from all three water indices were lower than an allowed limit of 30 m (equivalent to spatial resolution of the Landsat 8 image). However, the shoreline extracted from AWEI had the highest accuracy and it was considered the most appropriate shoreline at the acquisition time of image.