In order to grasp the urban expansion process in different temporal sequences objectively, rapidly and accurately, DMSP/OLS data, SPOT-VGT data, Landsat ETM+ data, DEM Data and social and economic statistics data were used to rebuild the urban expansion process. Two methods were selected to extract urban areas in Huaihe River Basin (HRB), one was threshold value method, the other was support vector machine (SVM) classification method. The results of two methods were compared with urban areas extracted from Landsat ETM+data and the result of SVM classification method which accuracy above 80% was proved to be more precise both in spatial form and accuracy estimation of urban areas. The urban areas in HRB for the year 1998, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2010 and 2013 were extracted using SVM classification method. And there were four features of the extracted urban areas calculated and analyzed to understand the dynamism of urban areas in HRB, including the extended area, urbanization intensive index (UII), extended dynamic degree and spatial pattern. The extended urban areas from 2001 to 2013 of HRB approximately showed a linear growth. UII illustrated that there were still a large number of rural areas to be developed in HRB. The extended dynamic degree stated that the urban areas expanded in a medium speed. The spatial pattern and the spatial metric revealed that there was no central city in HRB and the density of cities was not very high.