Surface water mapping for Watershed management using Geospatial technique

Effective data regarding surface water availability for watershed management demands application of geospatial techniques such as remote sensing, image processing techniques and GIS. The present study is attempted to investigate the feasibility of surface water mapping from moderate resolution image with the aid of image processing techniques for the Ambuliyar sub watershed covering largely the semi arid tract of Pudukkottai district. The results of the study shows that the application of Tasseled Cap Transformation is useful for reducing image dimension and the Crisp filter algorithm has been used for sharpening the image for enhancing edges. Further, the supervised classification technique with maximum likely hood classifier has been used to separate the tanks and nontanks pixels. The comparative overlay assessment of tanks extracted from the Survey of India Toposheet in the scale of 1: 50,000 with shows considerable overlap with several isolated pixels similar to the tanks owing to the saturated soil at the time of image acquisition and illumination characteristics of the soil and depth perception of the tanks.Watershed management, Surface water configuration, Geospatial Techniques, Landsat ETM, Tasseled Cap transformation, Crisp filter, Maximum likely hood classifier Effective data regarding surface water availability for watershed management demands application of geospatial techniques such as remote sensing, image processing techniques and GIS. The present study is attempted to investigate the feasibility of surface water mapping from moderate resolution image with the aid of image processing techniques for the Ambuliyar sub watershed covering largely the semi arid tract of Pudukkottai district. The results of the study shows that the application of Tasseled Cap Transformation is useful for reducing image dimension and the Crisp filter algorithm has been used for sharpening the image for enhancing edges. Further, the supervised classification technique with maximum likely hood classifier has been used to separate the tanks and nontanks pixels. The comparative overlay assessment of tanks extracted from the Survey of India Toposheet in the scale of 1: 50,000 with shows considerable overlap with several isolated pixels similar to the tanks owing to the saturated soil at the time of image acquisition and illumination characteristics of the soil and depth perception of the tanks.