Live coral cover (LCC) is regarded as the most efficient indicator of coral reef health. However, LCCs are usually sampled with standardized transect or photo quadrat techniques in field, which are incomplete and labour-intensive. To overcome such difficulties, we study a model to transfer the pixels of multispectral satellite images to quantitative LCCs. The idea is to extend band ratio-based (BR) indices to a novel index constructed using the ratio of different linear combinations (RDLC) of band reflectance and water depths. On the basis of field surveyed LCCs, an empirical process is further proposed to solve the unknown parameters of this RDLC. This approach provides new thinking for designing LCC-sensitive indices for given multispectral satellite images. The experimental results on Weizhou Island and Palmyra Atoll demonstrate that the method is effective and feasible, where the mean relative errors (MREs) are improved from 45 to 56% for BRs to 23-29% for RDLCs for Weizhou Island.