Abstract: For improving Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI), the limitation of NDVI when it was employed as the indicator of crop growth condition monitoring by remote sensing was analyzed in this paper. GRNDVI was promoted as the substitution of NDVI by just using red and near infrared bands. The pixel-level and image-level comparisons between the new index and other four counterparts (NDVI, SR, TDVI and RNDVI) illuminated that GRNDVI could cover the NDVI deficiencies, which meant that NDVI was sensitive to soil background at low vegetation canopy and easy to saturate at highly covered canopy. The results show the potential of using GRNDVI as the indicator of crop growth condition monitoring by remote sensing.