This paper presents a new method that combines PCA with HSI to differentiate and extract construction shadows from high resolution remote sensing images and then calculates each block floor area ratio by using regression analysis. The proposed method reduces the complexity and instability when extracting floor area ratios using the traditional method. Taking downtown Fuzhou as an example, we extracted the construction shadow and floor area ratio by the new method, to compare and validate it against the traditional method. The results show that the shadow index from the new method is more reliable and precise than results obtained from the traditional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]