Water Body Extraction from Landsat ETM+ Imagery
Using Adaboost Algorithm
Li Shen*, Changchun Li
College of Resources Science & Technology
Beijing Normal University
Beijing, China
*Corresponding author: shenli@ires.cn
Abstract—Extracting water body information accurately from
remotely sensed imagery is significant for surveying, planning
and protecting water resources, and particularly flood disaster
management such as monitoring, evaluation, emergency response
and so on. Landsat ETM+ imagery has such features as high
spatial resolution and multi-spectral resolution, which provides a
rich, reliable and accurate source of fundamental data for
research on water body extraction. Now, researchers have
investigated lots of techniques and methods for deriving water
information automatically. Previous work was often devoted to
finding a sophisticated classifier to identify water body, and it is
not only difficult to make full use of available features, but also
easy to get into predicament of training the complex classifier. In
this paper, a novel scheme for water body extraction from
Landsat ETM+ imagery using the adaboost algorithm is
proposed. It is based on such consideration that finding many
rough rules of thumb can be a lot easier and more effective than
finding a single, highly prediction rule. Adaboost is a general
strategy for learning classifiers by combining simple ones. The
idea of adaboost is to take a “weak classifier” - that is, any
classifier that will do at least slightly better than chance – and use
it to build a much better classifier, thereby boosting the
performance of the weak classification algorithm. The excellent
property of adaboost is the ability to integrate disparate
classifiers that concentrate on different aspects of the problem,
and place more weight on features that could train more accurate
base classifiers. This paper, with Landsat ETM+ imagery as
study object data, combines weak classifiers which are
constructed by spectral information of each band, water index
and relationship between spectrums to form a strong water body
extraction classifier. The experimental results show that this
method can achieve perfect performance, and is more effective
than traditional algorithms.
Keywords-water body extraction; remote sensing imagery;
AdaBoost; ETM+
I. INTRODUCTION
Extracting water body information accurately from
remotely sensed imagery has been a hot issue in the object
recognition area. It is significant for surveying, planning and
protecting water resources, and particularly flood disaster
management such as monitoring, evaluation, emergency
response and so on.
Landsat ETM+ imagery has features of high spatial
resolution, abundant spectral information and relatively fewer
mixed pixels within a ground resolution cell, which is helpful
Supported by the Key Technologies R&D Program under Grant
No.2008BAC34B03, the Hi-tech Research and Development Program of
China under Grant No.2007AA120205.
for identifying the water boundary. Many water body
extraction strategies from ETM+ imagery have focused on
analyzing spectral discrepancy in different bands between
water and other ground objects, and making use of a single
band or multiband combination to recognize water body object.
Employing the 5th channel of ETM+ imagery, namely short
wave infrared band, by setting appropriate threshold value K,
water and land can be identified roughly, but is prone to
misclassify mountain, cloud and shadow as water [1]. Zhou
found that the water body exits special spectral characteristic:
TM band 2 + TM band 3 > TM band 4 + TM band 5 (the
reflectivity value of the nth channel of ETM+ imagery denoted
by TM band n) [2]. This method is able to partly eliminate the
influence of shadow, but still hard to distinguish residential
region and water. Dividing the pixels in green band by the
corresponding pixels in near-infrared band, Mcfeeters proposed
the normalized water index (NDWI) [3], which largely
restrains vegetation information, and highlight the water body
information. Based the improvement on NDWI, Xu developed
a new water index, MNDWI (Modified NDWI), which works
especially well on extracting water body in urban areas [4].
Obviously, previous work on water body extraction was
often devoted to finding a sophisticated classifier to identify
water body, and it is not only difficult to make full use of
available features, but also easy to get into predicament of
training the complex classifier.
In this paper, a novel scheme for water body extraction
from Landsat ETM+ imagery using the adaboost algorithm is
presented. Adaboost is an ensemble strategy, which is used to
boost the classification performance of a weak leaner. It is
based on such consideration that finding many rough rules of
thumb can be a lot easier and more effective than finding a
single, highly prediction rule. By combining weak classifiers
which are constructed by spectral information of each band,
water index and relationship between spectrums, a strong water
body extraction classifier is formed.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, a brief
description of adaboost algorithm is provided. Section III
represents the core of the paper. The realization procedure and
experiment results of water body extraction from Landsat
ETM+ imagery using adaboost algorithm is introduced. Finally,
conclusions are drawn and several issues for future work are
indicated.
 II. DESCRIPTION OF ADABOOST ALGORITHM εj = ∑
i: yi ≠ h j
Dt ( xi , yi ) (2)
Adaboost was proposed by Freund and Schapire [5] as an
efficient algorithm of the ensemble learning filed. It combines
iteratively the weak classifiers by taking into account a weight b) Choose the weak classifier ht , with the lowest error
distribution on the training samples such that more weight is εt .
attributed to samples misclassified by the previous iterations. In
this way, adaboost “focuses in” on the informative or c) If ε t ≥ 1/ 2 , then stop.
“difficult” patterns. The final strong classifier takes the form of
a perceptron, a weighted combination of weak classifiers d) If ε t < 1/ 2 , set
followed by a threshold. Fig. 1 shows the algorithm flow chart
for adaboost. 1 1− εt
αt = In( ) (3)
2 εt
Input a training set
e) Update the weights:

Initialize weights
Dt ( xi , yi )e −αt yt ht ( xi )
Dt +1 ( xi , yi ) = (4)
Zt
Train weak
classifiers Z t is simply a normalizing constant computed to insure that
N
Dt ( xi , yi ) represents a true distribution, ∑ D ( x ,y ) = 1 .
i =1
t i

Compute error 4) Output the final classifier:

rate
Update
weights T
H ( x) = sign(∑ α t ht ( x )) (5)
t =1

Termination
condition III. REALIZATION OF WATER BODY EXTRACTION USING
ADABOOST ALGORITHM

A. The Form of Weak Classifiers

Output the
final classifier
Figure 1. The algorithm flow for adaboost
The detailed description of adaboost algorithm for the
binary classification task is as follows.
1) Establish a training sets: Let the samples and their
labels be denoted xi and yi , respectively and let Dt ( xi , yi ) be
the tth distribution over all these traning samples .Given a
training set {( x1 , y1 ), ( x2 , y2 )," , ( xn , yn )} , where yi ∈ {−1,1} .
2) Initialize weights:
D0 ( xi , yi ) = 1/ N i = 1, 2,..N (1)
3) Training Loop: For t = 1, 2,..., T ( T is the maximum
training number):
a) For each feature j , train a classifier h j which is
restricted to using a single feature.The error is evaluated with
respect to Dt ( xi , yi ) :
One of the greatest strengths of adaboost algorithm is
embodied in it avoiding the hard work to find an optimal
sophisicated classifier, but turning to simply combining
different “weak” classifiers, accuracy only slightly better than
chance. As a matter of fact, in real cases we have only limited
data sets and sometime only few examples are available, thus
the optimal classifier is difficult to obtain. In this paper, we
adopt the simple linear classifier as the form of weak
classifiers, which is expressed as (6):
⎧⎪1 if p j xi , j < p jθ i , j
h ( xi ) = ⎨ (6)
⎪⎩ −1 otherwise
xi , j is the value of the jth feature of sample xi , p j ∈ {−1,1}
determines the direction of the inequality sign, θi , j denotes the
threshold value of the jth feature of sample xi .
B. Feature Selection for Constructing Weak Classifiers
Extracting water body from ETM+ imagery, spectral
reflectance of seven bands (exclusive of the panchromatic
channel), normalized vegetation index (NDVI), NDWI,
MNDWI and water ratio index (WRI) are selected as features
to train the weak classifiers.
1) Spectral reflectance of seven bands
The seven bands of ETM+ imagery correspond to the
spectral regions of the blue, the green, the red, the near
infrared, the middle infrared, the thermal infrared and another
middle infrared, respectively. Considering the spectral
reflectance of water, probably the most distinctive
characteristic is the energy absorption at near infrared
wavelengths and beyond [6].
2) NDVI
NDVI is defined as follows [7]:
NRI − R
(7)
NDVI =
NRI + R
For ETM+ imagery, NRI is TM band 4, and R is TM band 3.
Obviously, NDVI values range from -1 to +1. Because of
high reflectance in the near infrared portion of the
electromagnetic spectrum, healthy vegetation is represented by
high NDVI values between 0.1 and 1. Conversely, non-
vegetated surfaces such as water body yield negative values of
NDVI owing to the electromagnetic absorption quality of water.
3) NDWI and MNDWI
NDWI is expressed as follows [3]:
Green − NIR
NDWI = (8)
Green + NIR
For ETM+ imagery, Green is TM band 2.
This index is designed to maximize reflectance of water by
using green wavelengths; minimize the low reflectance of the
near infrared band by water features; and take advantage of
the high reflectance of the near infrared band by vegetation
and soil features. As a result water features have positive
NDWI values and thus are evenhanded, while vegetation and
soil usually get zero or negative values and therefore are
suppressed.
MNDWI is expressed as follows [4]:
Green − MIR
MNDWI = (9)
Green + MIR
For ETM+ imagery, MIR is TM band 5.
The research by Xu has showed that MNDWI is more
suitable for enhancing and extracting water information for a
water region with a background dominated by built-up land
areas.
4) WRI
Since water body exits special spectral characteristic: TM
band 2 + TM band 3 > TM band 4 + TM band 5, water ratio
index can be expressed as follows:
Green + R
WRI = (10)
NRI + MRI
It is easy to get that the WRI value of Water body is greater
than 1.
C. Experimental Results
In order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed
approach, we considered a real data set. Huairou reservoirs in
Beijing City and a part of Bengcuo Lake in Nagchu county of
Tibet are selected from the ETM+ imagery for the test, which
were captured in May, 2007 and in December, 2000,
respectively. For the convenience of narration, the Huairou
reservoirs imagery is denoted by IMG1 and the Bengcuo Lake
imagery is IMG2. In addition, it is acknowledged that NDWI is
a perfect characteristic to indicate water, thus, the comparison
of the extracted water body results by NDWI-based
thresholding method and adboost algorithm is conducted.
Fig.2 shows some qualitative results for the test imageries.
The background of IMG1 is mainly built-up land, mountain
and vegetation (Fig.2 (a)). It is clear, as shown in Fig.2 (b)- (c),
that the extracted water patches by the NDWI-based
thresholding method are mixed with many built-up land
patches, but the built-up land noise is notably suppressed or
even removed by adaboost algorithm. This is because some
built-up land reflects more green light than the near infrared
light, just as water does. Therefore, its mean value in TM band
2 is probably greater than that in TM band 4, resulting in the
positive mean value of the NDWI and low contrast with water.
Instead of only considering one NDWI feature, the adaboost
algorithm utilizes the other features such as MNDWI to
eliminate the influence of the building land from the water
body.
The background of IMG2 is intentionally selected to be
dominated by bare mountains, some locations of which are
covered by accumulated snow (Fig.2 (d)). Moreover, at the
lower right corner of IMG2, there is obvious mountain shadow.
Visual inspection from false color composite ETM+ imagery
(RGB: 432) can find that there are great tone discrepancies
between the water body and the accumulated snow. However,
the NDWI value of water body is very close to that of snow.
Therefore, it is difficult to determine an appropriate NDWI
threshold value to separate them. The result shown by Fig.2 (e)
proves this point. One feature is not able to avoid the
interference from other ground objects, but the multiple
features could solve this problem easily. It is clear, as shown
in Fig.2 (f), that accumulated snow is accurately classified as
non-water body. Especially by adaboost algorithm the
mountain shadow noise, which is easily confused with water
but usually difficult to be removed if without using
sophisticated procedures, is also reduced remarkably.
 (a) (b)
(d) (e)
Figure2. Water body extraction results(the white regions are water in the binary imageries) for NDWI-based thresholding method and adaboost
algorithm.(a)Huairou reservors ETM+ imagery(RGB:432);(d)A part of Bengcuo Lake ETM+imagery(RGB:432); (b) and(e) extracted water body by NDWI-
based thresholding;(c) and (f) extracted water body by adaboost algorithm.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
A water body extraction technique from ETM+ imagery is
developed by using adaboost algorithm. The method is
essentially an approach of ensemble learning. Various spectral
features are used to train different weak classifiers, which
concentrate on different aspects of the water body extraction
problem but is only required to have accuracy slightly better
than random chance. The strong classifier, combined by
weighted sum of weak classifiers, works as the final classifier
to extract water body. Our results show that adaboost algorithm
compares favorably with the NDWI-based thresholding
method, particularly in the aspect of eliminating the influence
of built-up land, accumulated snow and mountain shadow.
Furthermore, in order to enhance the performance of the
proposed method further, taking spatial neighborhood
relationship features into account will be worth exploring.
(c)
(f)
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