**6. Conclusion**

A new algorithm for the detection and delineation of surface water bodies based on high spatial resolution airborne VNIR imaging spectroscopy data has been developed. In contrast to existing methods the proposed approach does not require *a priori* knowledge nor user input, manual thresholding or fine-tuning of input parameters and is able to automatically detect and delineate surface water bodies with a very high accuracy. Thus, the developed algorithm is suitable for implementation in automated processing chains. The algorithm was tested on different sensor data (AISA Eagle and HyMap), works for different types of landscapes (tested: urban, rural and coastal) and is not influenced by different atmospheric correction methods (tested: ATCOR-4 (Richter, 2011), MIP (Heege & Fischer, 2004), ACUM-R (unpublished in-house development by K. Segl), the method of L. Guanter et al. (Guanter *et al.*, 2009), and empirical line correction). Future issues will be to improve the detection of small and narrow water bodies, the detection of white water and of water under shadow. Furthermore, the proposed method will be tested on hyperspectral VNIR satellite data.
