An experimental study on the estimation of vegetation cover rate within one pixel using the vegetation index of satellite images was made with the simulathon of airborne MSS data and Landsat MSS data and with the test site of urbanized areas. In the airborne data simulation experiment, the correlation between the vegetation cover rate data made from the cluster analysis of the original data of 5 meters restlution and the vegetation index of the pseudo satellite image made by averaging the original image was investigated with the mesh size of 20, 30, 50, and 80 meters square, and as the result, high correlation above 0.9 was obtained with all mesh sizes from 20 to 80 meters square. In the experiment with Landsat MSS data, it was shown that the vegetation index obtained by MSS data is highly correlated to the vegetation cover rate obtained by Digital National Land Information within a mesh of one kirometer square. These experimental studies verify the possibility of direct estimation of vegetation cover rate within one pixel at urbanized areas using various satellite images such as Landsat TM and MSS, MOS-1 MESSR, and SPOT.
View full abstract