In order to investigate the extraction effect of different water extraction methods for Poyang Lake, and to clarify the influencing factors and application range of different water indices, the Modified Normalized Difference Water Index（MNDWI）, Automated Water Extraction Index（AWEIsh）, Water Index（WI2015）, and Floating Algae Index（FAI）were constructed to extract the water body information based on Landsat 8 remote sensing images of the main lake area of Poyang Lake, and the results of manual visual interpretation of Sentinel-2 MSI satellite images were used to verify the extraction accuracy of each index. The results show that Landsat 8 imagery can support large scale complex terrain water extraction studies and can provide rich feature spectral information for water body extraction. Compared with the other four water body indices based on threshold extraction, the MNDWI index has the highest accuracy of 95.50% with the Kappa coefficient of 0.870 8 in extracting water bodies. It performes best in eliminating the atmospheric influence and can be applied to various typical areas. The accuracy of AWEIsh is second only to MNDWI index, but it is better than MNDWI index in extracting inland lakes and can be used as a complementary index for the extraction of regional water bodies with relatively large range of inland lakes in future studies.