REMOTE SENSING UAV/DRONE TECHNOLOGY AS A TOOL FOR URBAN DEVELOPMENT MEASURES IN APCRDA

Abstract. Now-a-days, collecting accurate and meaningful information about the urban localities/environment with the maximum efficiency in terms of cost and time has become more relevant for urban, rural and city level development planning and administration. This work presents a technical procedure for automatic extraction of building information and characterization of different urban building types within the Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority (APCRDA) jurisdiction areas using UAVs. The methodology consists of a number of sequential processes of acquisition and generation of high resolution Orthomosaic images, creation of 3D point cloud data, and image classification algorithm for feature extraction using exclusively the geometric coordinates. The main parameters of the urban structures/buildings assessed in this work are site area of the building, built-up area, and building dimensions, building setbacks and building height. Different geometric and appropriate metrics were automatically extracted for each of the elements, defining the urban typology. In this study, residential and commercial buildings were considered for the analysis and the measurements from Drone were validated with respective approved plans and manual inspections and showed positive results with threshold parameters like setbacks and height as per building bye-laws of Andhra Pradesh Government Order (G.O) 119. Based on the results, measurements from Drone are used for the buildings occupancy permissions following the State government building rules. This automated system would replace physical inspections and manual reports and significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency. As an important component in this pilot study, visualisation of the building information were represented / displayed on a web application in an interactive mode. This added value of UAV technology with an automated system in comparison with traditional ways provides geospatial information and can also be considered as an essential Earth Observation indicator which has the potential to lead to next generation Urban Information Services and in the Smart cities development. The considerable potential use of these indicators in urban planning and development offers an opportunity in appropriate decision making in day to day urban planning measures.