vegetation index In remote sensing, a technique to show vegetation in an image. An example is the normalized vegetation index, which calculates how far pixels in an image plot from the soil line by dividing the very-*near infrared digital number value by the red digital number value of a multispectral data set.

vegetation index In remote sensing, a classification of the ranges of brightness in different wavelength bands corresponding to the reflectance of electromagnetic radiation by vegetation cover, and sometimes specific vegetation types, as opposed to rock, soil, or water cover.