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There is a growing concern over surface water dynamics due to an increased understanding of water availability and management with current climate trends. Remote sensing has now become an effective means of water extraction due to the availability of an enormous amount of data with diverse spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions. However, water extraction from optical remote sensing data is associated with several major difficulties, such as the applicability of the extraction method over large areas and complex environments; shadow contamination from clouds, buildings, and mountains; and disclosure of shadowed water and exclusion of floating and submerged plants. To address these difficulties, a learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network-based method was proposed and implemented to extract water using Landsat 8 imageries. This method is capable of separating water from clouds, build-up areas, shadows, and shadowed water by the ideal input of bands 1 to 7 and normalized difference vegetation index. This model learns water across Sri Lanka. Eight OLI scenes were tested, and the performance was compared with five widely used machine learning algorithms: support vector machine, K-nearest neighbor, discriminant analysis, combination of modified normalized difference water index and modified fuzzy clustering method, and K-means clustering methods. This method performed the best, achieving overall accuracies and the kappa coefficients between 97.8% and 99.7% and between 0.96 and 0.99, respectively. Results have demonstrated robustness, consistency, and preciseness in various dark surfaces, noisiest water environments, and highly water scarce scenes. LVQ revealed a good generalizing ability to detect all types of water with less amount of training samples. This method can be easily adaptable for other sensors and global water to support water resource studies.