{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,1]],"date-time":"2026-04-01T15:37:38Z","timestamp":1775057858448,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":51,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2018,2,11]],"date-time":"2018-02-11T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1518307200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"the National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["41471348 and 41771448"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["41471348 and 41771448"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"the Science and Technology Plans of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People\u2019s Republic of China, and Opening Projects of Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Urban Design, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Arch","award":["UDC201650100"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["UDC201650100"]}]},{"name":"the Project of State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology","award":["2017-ZY-03"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2017-ZY-03"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Accurate and timely information related to quantitative descriptions and spatial distributions of urban areas is crucial to understand urbanization dynamics and is also helpful to address environmental issues associated with rapid urban land-cover changes. Thresholding is acknowledged as the most popular and practical way to extract urban information from nighttime lights. However, the difficulty of determining optimal threshold remains challenging to applications of this method. In order to address the problem of selecting thresholds, a Genetic Algorithm-based urban cluster automatic threshold (GA-UCAT) method by combining Visible-Infrared Imager-Radiometer Suite Day\/Night band (VIIRS DNB), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) is proposed to distinguish urban areas from dark rural background in NTL images. The key point of this proposed method is to design an appropriate fitness function of GA by means of integrating between-class variance and inter-class variance with all these three data sources to determine optimal thresholds. In accuracy assessments by comparing with ground truth\u2014Landsat 8 OLI images, this new method has been validated and results with OA (Overall Accuracy) ranging from 0.854 to 0.913 and Kappa ranging from 0.699 to 0.722 show that the GA-UCAT approach is capable of describing spatial distributions and giving detailed information of urban extents. Additionally, there is discussion on different classifications of rural residential spots in Landsat remote sensing images and nighttime light (NTL) and evaluations of spatial-temporal development patterns of five selected Chinese urban clusters from 2012 to 2017 on utilizing this proposed method. The new method shows great potential to map global urban information in a simple and accurate way and to help address urban environmental issues.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs10020277","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2018,2,12]],"date-time":"2018-02-12T10:50:38Z","timestamp":1518432638000},"page":"277","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":62,"title":["A Genetic Algorithm-Based Urban Cluster Automatic Threshold Method by Combining VIIRS DNB, NDVI, and NDBI to Monitor Urbanization"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"10","author":[{"given":"Kangning","family":"Li","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7926-7303","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yunhao","family":"Chen","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China"},{"name":"Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Urban Design, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing 100044, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2018,2,11]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"United Nations (2014). 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