Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in urban land regularization process. Opportunities and challenges

Land regularization is an essential ingredient in the formalization on land rights and it plays an important role in improving tenure security of the urban poor. In order to facilitate the process of land regularization, there is need to have up to date spatial information on the settlements earmarked for the regularization process. Ground based survey methods have proved to be time consuming and costly. Thus there is need to adopt cost effective methodology in the acquisition of spatial data. In this study, an approach based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) was trialed for rapid assessment of a settlement earmarked for land regularization. The approach involved image acquisition for an area of 0.75km2 and processing to generate orthomosaic to aid in the regularization process. The developed approach demonstrates the utility of UAVs in the acquisition of spatial data for urban land regularization.