An easy and low-cost method for preprocessing and matching small-scale amateur aerial photography for assessing agricultural land use in Burkina Faso

In recent decades, the Kou watershed in south-western Burkina Faso has suffered from poor water management. Despite the abundance of water, most water users regularly face water shortages because of the increase in the amount of land under irrigation. To help them achieve a more equitable allocation of irrigated land, local stakeholders need an easily managed low-cost tool for monitoring and mapping these irrigated zones. The aim of this study was to develop a fast and low-cost procedure for mosaicing and geo referencing amateur small-scale aerial photographs for land-use surveys. Sets of tens (2009) and hundreds (2007) of low-altitude aerial photographs, with a resolution of 0.4 m and 0.8 m, respectively, were used to create a detailed land-cover map of typical African small-scale irrigated agriculture. A commercially available stitching tool and GIS allowed geo referenced 'mono-images’ to be constructed; both mosaics were warped on a high-resolution SPOT image with a horizontal root mean square error (RMSE) of about 11 m. The RMSE between the two image datasets was 2 m. This approach is less sensitive to atmospheric conditions that are non-predictable in programming satellite imagery.