A procedure for semi-automated cadastral boundary feature extraction from high-resolution satellite imagery

Abstract

Fit-for-purpose land administration aims to align cadastral policies, administration and technology selection with the prevailing societal needs and capacity within a country context. It seeks to support delivery of more rapid and low-cost cadastral boundary mapping – and ultimately more widespread land tenure security. The philosophy suggests that when high positional accuracies are not the primary concern, but when time pressure is, high-resolution satellite images can serve as a source for creating cadastral boundary information. This paper explores the potential of mean-shift segmentation plug-in in QGIS to semi-automatically extract cadastral boundaries in rural areas – based on the land cover information from WorldView-2 satellite images. The segmentation gives a vector file satisfying many cadastral boundary requirements and ready to be used in a GIS environment. The buffer overlay method was used to assess the quality of extracted boundaries. For a non-vegetated terrain having visible boundaries, the approach could be taken as an alternative to support existing, relatively slow, boundary mapping approaches by minimizing the effects of manual digitization and surveying.

Keywords:

• Cadastre
• feature extraction
• semi-automatic
• boundary mapping
• satellite imagery
• mean-shift segmentation
• QGIS
• fit for purpose

Acknowledgement

The authors are very grateful to the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestion which led to the present form of the paper. We are also thankful to the individuals from BoEPLAUA of the Amhara region, Ethiopia, RIELA and LIFT project and staffs of ILA, BDU for providing necessary information during the study.

Notes

1. A kebele is the lowest administrative unit next to a woreda. On average, around 6000 parcels are found in a kebele (personal communication, 14 October 2015) in the Amhara region.