Center looking to give AI boost to drone-enabled rural land mapping programme

Drones are used for land mapping in India under the SVAMITVA scheme

The government is looking to bolster its drone-based rural land mapping programme with artificial intelligence (AI) to get a clear idea of property boundaries, water bodies and more.

Launched in 2020, the Survey of Villages Abadi and Mapping with Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA) scheme aims to provide an integrated property validation solution for rural India.

The government is looking to deploy AI for automatic extraction of data for features such as boundaries of properties, road networks, identify and delineate water bodies, etc  from imageries.

For training the AI extraction model, the government will give access to drone dataset of 300 villages apart from other SVAMITVA data.

The drone data is currently at National Informatics Centre (NIC) Cloud Hyderabad. The accuracy of the imagery is upto 5 cm.

The government, in a request for proposal (RFP) floated to empanel interested agencies, is seeking a 95 percent accuracy rate for extraction of such data.

The moves comes at a time when the government is focusing on increasing the country's AI capabilities through policies such as the Rs 10,732-crore IndiaAI Mission.

Interested agencies have been recommended the usage of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a type of artificial neural network widely used for image/object recognition and classification for the project.

It has also recommended the usage of U-Net or Mask R-CNN -- both deep-learning models used for image segmentation, which is the process of identifying and outlining objects within an image.

The government has set a deadline of two months (from the selection of the agency) for the development of the AI model and has set a target of covering 10,000 sq km for extracting data per week.

NIC will play the role of quality assurance and quality control for the project.

By leveraging technology drones, the SVAMITVA scheme facilitates the demarcation of inhabited lands in rural areas, thus enabling the creation of accurate land records.

This helps in reducing property disputes, ensures clear property ownership, and aids in the issuance of property cards to the landowners.

It would provide the “record of rights” to village household owners possessing houses in inhabited rural areas in villages which, in turn, would enable them to use their property as a financial asset for taking loans and other benefits from banks.