A level-based method for urban mapping using NPP-VIIRS nighttime light data

In this paper, we propose a level-set method to identify urban areas using a nighttime light data of Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). Our method is compared to two standard methods, called the Otsu's threshold-based method and the k-mean clustering method. The experimental results indicates significant improvement in terms of the Kappa coefficients.