Exploring UAV in Indonesian cadastral boundary data acquisition

Accelerating the process of land registration is a key issue in emerging countries like Indonesia. However, existing methods – typically based around terrestrial measurements for surveying and mapping activities – are slow-paced and entail decades more work to ensure completion. Increasing demand for information about land tenure and use inspires the development of fit-for-purpose approaches. Emerging technologies such as Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAVs) are potentially a worthy alternative for enabling swifter, cheaper – yet still appropriately accurate – land data acquisition. This research seeks to evaluate the use of UAV technology for cadastral boundary data acquisition processes in Indonesia. After a comprehensive review of requisites for cadastral boundary data survey and UAV regulation in Indonesia, various requirement elements were derived to design a UAV-image based approach. The designed approach utilizes UAV derived imagery capture and participatory boundary mapping methods for the boundary delineation. By comparison with the existing terrestrial method, and evaluating against fit-for-purpose criteria, the UAV based image approach showed a higher perceived involvement of the community and` indicated an improvement in cost efficiency, decreased duration, resulted in a high accuracy UAV ortho-photo, and adequate spatial descriptions of boundaries.