A comparative study of drone and high resolution satellite data for detailed land use/land cover mapping

Abstract

Many a times, it is important for local authorities to have an inventory of land in a very detailed format for planning purposes and acquiring land for development. One such application was to prepare detailed land use/land cover map for developing a new township christened Aerotropolis near Mohali in Punjab for Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA). There are many choices of remote sensing data at hand which includes World View (WV)-II high resolution (HR) satellite data and the more recent drone data. In general, WV-II falls short to map some key features and needs extensive field work to support interpretation. Field work is both time consuming and costly and weather dependent. The present work focuses on the comparison of two data sets to identify drones potential for use in detailed mapping. The study included five villages covering 20 km2 area and located just outside the 5 km limit of Chandigarh International Airport as is required under the Govt. Policy to fly drones. Necessary permissions were also sought from District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police SAS Nagar with information to Airport Authority. A Quadcopter drone with a spatial resolution of 5 cm was flown around 24th April 2018 and data compared with WV-II data of 50 cm spatial resolution of vintage of 5 May 2018. Apparently, WV-II data was marked with shadow effect unlike drone data and therefore, drone could clearly demarcate vacant plots, alleys, buildings, village boundary, drain, trees, electrical line and poles and provided a means for detailed mapping and is, therefore, a fit candidate as a choice for planning and acquiring land for developing new townships.