Zakaria Mat Arof

The feasibility of using low-cost commercial unmanned aerial vehicle for small area topographic mapping

Conventionally small area topographic detail plan is produced using land survey techniques. Various method of modern topographical detail plan however required more cost to speed up the data acquisition process for large data and high accuracy. The recent development in commercial grade Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has the potential to be used as a data capture equipment with low cost. In this study, commercial quadcopter UAV was used as an aerial image data capture vehicle. The images were captured at a lower altitude and then processed by using SfM software. Eight ground control points and a set of 15 and 17 check points was established by using RTK-GPS method. The outputs of this study were Digital Surface Model (DSM) and building footprint vector line. For accuracy assessment, the root means square error (RMSE) was used to evaluate the accuracy of a planimetric and vertical component of DSM. Based on the assessment, the results show the accuracy of sub-meter in planimetric and 5m in vertical. In conclusion, the usage of the low-cost commercial UAV has great potential in topographic data capture for detail plan production.

Marine cadastre legal framework for Malaysia

The coastal Malays in particular regarded the seas as natural appurtenances to the land they occupy. Sovereign nations exercised absolute sovereignty and jurisdiction in seas covering the whole of sovereignty area of Malaysia. The seas surrounding the land played a significant role in the defence, economic, and political matters of the nation concerned. The sovereignty of nation depend on concept of unity between land and water expressed by the Malay word ‘tanahair’ which literally means land and water is depict to the meaning of native land. Such was already the significance and appreciation of the seas in this region. As early as 1276, during the reign of Sultan Muhammed Shah the first sovereign of the Malacca Sultanate, it was found that the Malays had already designed a set of laws of the sea applicable in sea areas within the jurisdiction of the Malacca Sultanate. These laws were referred to as the Malaca Code. Furthermore, introduction of marine cadastre is a new kind of sea uses, spatial extension of ongoing sea uses and the need to better protect and better arrangement of marine parcel for various users, as well as between the users and the environment. Marine cadastre legal framework is the process to define the marine alienation and marine spatial planning to allocate space for specific uses which can help to avoid user conflicts, to improve the management of marine spatial claim and sustain an ecosystem-based management of ocean.