Beyond NDVI: A Proposed Vegetation Cover Index (VCI) for Crop and Vegetation Segregation

The proposed work introduces a vegetation cover index (VCI) for segregating the vegetation and crop land cover using a base index NBR, for the proposed index water class has been excluded beforehand in the preprocessing steps. This new index assigns negative values to urban and barren lands, which further helps extract the target classes easily. Moreover, the vegetation and crop classes can also be filtered out and identified on their own with minimum confusion. This index works well in the correlation with Essential climate variables LAI, FCOVER and FAPAR and outperforms the NDVI in this regard, further in terms of separability of the target classes, the proposed index attains the M statistics value of ${1. 6 2 5 9}$ as compared to ${1. 1 4 7 8}$ of NDVI index, which confirms that this index is more suitable for the classification of the vegetation and crop than that of NDVI which has long been the benchmark for vegetation monitoring