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Journal of Geosciences and Geomatics. 2018, 6(3), 103-123
DOI: 10.12691/JGG-6-3-2
Original Research

UAV-based Approach to Extract Topographic and As-built Information by Utilising the OBIA Technique

Hairie Ilkham Sibaruddin1, 2, Helmi Zulhaidi Mohd Shafri1, 2, , Biswajeet Pradhan3 and Nuzul Azam Haron1

1Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia

2Geospatial Information Science Research Centre (GISRC), Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia

3School of Information, Systems & Modelling, Faculty of Engineering and IT, University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Sydney, Australia

Pub. Date: October 07, 2018
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Hairie Ilkham Sibaruddin, Helmi Zulhaidi Mohd Shafri, Biswajeet Pradhan and Nuzul Azam Haron. UAV-based Approach to Extract Topographic and As-built Information by Utilising the OBIA Technique. Journal of Geosciences and Geomatics. 2018; 6(3):103-123. doi: 10.12691/JGG-6-3-2

Abstract

In this study, the capability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) optical data to provide reliable topographic and as-built information was tested using the eBee Sensefly UAV system. The Object-based Image Analysis (OBIA) technique was used to extract important geospatial information for mapping. The robust Taguchi method was adopted to optimise the segmentation process. Feature space optimisation method was used to obtain the best features for image classification utilising different supervised OBIA classifiers, such as K-nearest neighbour (KNN), normal Bayes (NB), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM). Results showed that SVM obtained the highest percentage of overall accuracy, followed by RF, NB, DT and KNN at 97.20%, 95.80%, 93.14%, 86.01% and 77.62%, respectively. The McNemar test was implemented to analyse the significance of the classifier results. The as-built information showed that dimensional accuracy was less than 1 metre compared with ground survey measurement. We conclude that the combination of UAV and OBIA provides a rapid and efficient approach for map updating. This technique could replace the current procedure that utilises piloted aircraft and satellite images for data acquisition and reduce the time for digitising each feature that represents land cover for urban mapping.

Keywords

UAV, land cover, topography map, as-built, OBIA, segmentation

Copyright

Creative CommonsThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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