Uncertainties Involved in the Use of Thresholds for the Detection of Water Bodies in Multitemporal Analysis from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 Images

Although the single threshold is still considered a suitable and easy-to-do technique to extract water features in spatiotemporal analysis, it leads to unavoidable errors. This paper uses an enumerative search to optimize thresholds over satellite-derived modified normalized difference water index (MNDWI). We employed a cross-validation approach and treated accuracy as a random variable in order to: (a) investigate uncertainty related to its application; (b) estimate non-optimistic errors involving single thresholding; (c) investigate the main factors that affect the accuracy’s model, and (d) compare satellite sensors performance. We also used a high-resolution digital elevation model to extract water elevations values, making it possible to remove topographic effects and estimate non-optimistic errors exclusively from orbital imagery. Our findings evidenced that there is a region where thresholds values can vary without causing accuracy loss. Moreover, by constraining thresholds variation between these limits, accuracy is dramatically improved and outperformed the Otsu method. Finally, the number of scenes employed to optimize a single threshold drastically affects the accuracy, being not appropriate using a single scene once it leads to overfitted threshold values. More than three scenes are recommended.