SAVI-derived Vegetation Image There are various vegetation indices to enhance vegetation information in remote sensing imagery usually by ratioing a near-infrared (NIR) band to a red band. This takes advantage of the high vegetation reflectance in NIR spectral range such as TM band 4 and high pigment absorption of red light, such as TM band 3 (Jensen, 2000). Although nearly everyone working with the remote sensing of vegetation knows the Normalized Difference Index (NDVI), this study employed SAVI to highlight vegetation features due to its advantage over NDVI when applied in an area with low plant cover such as the urban areas. SAVI can work in the area with plant cover as low as 15 percent, while NDVI can only work
effectively in the area with plant cover above 30 percent (Ray, 1994). The SAVI is calculated using the following equation(Huete, 1988):