Water body detection and delineation with Landsat TM data.

The aim of this project was to determine the accuracy of using simple digital image processing techniques to map riverine water bodies with Landsat 5 TM data. This paper quantifies the classification accuracy of single band density slicing of Landsat 5 TM data to delineate water bodies on riverine floodplains. The results of these analyses are then compared to a 6-band maximum likelihood classification over the same area. The water boundaries delineated by each of these digital classification procedures were compared to water boundaries delineated from colour aerial photography acquired on the same day as the TM data. These comparisons show that Landsat TM data can be used to map water bodies accurately. Density slicing of the single mid-infrared band 5 proved as successful as multispectral classification achieving an overall accuracy of 96.9%, a producer's accuracy for water bodies of 81.7% and a user's accuracy for water bodies of 64.5%.