An Assessment of Low-Cost Cropcam UAV Images for Land Cover/Use over Penang Island, Malaysia

The widely used scanner/sensor placed on either airborne or satellite is rather expensive; the difficulty in obtaining cloud-free scene at the equatorial region from satellite platforms can be overcome by using digital images captured by cropcam (UAV) autopilot. This technique is low-cost and provides us high resolution images compared with other airborne studies. The aim of this study is to assess images taken from a low-altitude cropcam platform for land cover/use mapping. Supervised and unsupervised classification techniques were applied to the full panorama image spectral bands (red, green and blue) to extract thematic information from acquired scenes. The study has confirmed that the use of a high resolution digital camera as a sensor on board of cropcam (UAV) as a platform low altitude provides useful information and real time-data to assess a small area of coverage for any desired area in an equatorial region. The final results stressed that this method can be used as a more suitable and cheaper tool for land cover/use mapping to accomplish high accuracy results.