Urban built-up area extraction from log-transformed NPP-VIIRS nighttime light composite data

Accurate information on urban areas at regional and global scales is required for various socioeconomic and environmental applications. The nighttime light (NTL) composite data have proven to be an effective data source for extracting urban areas. Various urban mapping methods have been proposed in the literature to extract urban built-up areas from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program's Operational Linescan System NTL data with a variable accuracy. However, most of the previous methods cannot be directly applied to the NTL data derived from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite with the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP-VIIRS) sensor onboard. In this letter, we introduced a logarithmic transformation to preprocess the NPP-VIIRS NTL composite data. Then, four popular methods for urban built-up area extraction were tested using the original and log-transformed NTL data, respectively. The selected methods included the thresholding technique, Sobel-based edge detection, neighborhood statistics analysis, and watershed segmentation. The accuracy of the results was evaluated through validating the urban areas derived using each method against the referenced urban areas obtained from the National Land Cover Database for the U.S.. The results indicated that logarithmic transformation is an effective procedure for enhancing the difference between urban built-up areas and nonurban areas. The selected methods for urban built-up area extraction were found to perform better on the log-transformed NTL data than the original NTL data.