The feasibility of using low-cost commercial unmanned aerial vehicle for small area topographic mapping

Conventionally small area topographic detail plan is produced using land survey techniques. Various method of modern topographical detail plan however required more cost to speed up the data acquisition process for large data and high accuracy. The recent development in commercial grade Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has the potential to be used as a data capture equipment with low cost. In this study, commercial quadcopter UAV was used as an aerial image data capture vehicle. The images were captured at a lower altitude and then processed by using SfM software. Eight ground control points and a set of 15 and 17 check points was established by using RTK-GPS method. The outputs of this study were Digital Surface Model (DSM) and building footprint vector line. For accuracy assessment, the root means square error (RMSE) was used to evaluate the accuracy of a planimetric and vertical component of DSM. Based on the assessment, the results show the accuracy of sub-meter in planimetric and 5m in vertical. In conclusion, the usage of the low-cost commercial UAV has great potential in topographic data capture for detail plan production.