CALCULATION OF THE OBJECTIVE WIDTH OF A WATERCOURSE’S REGULAR RIVERBED USING UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE

Abstract

The Permanent Preservation Areas (PPAs), according to the current Brazilian Forest Code (BFC), are delimited from the width of the regular riverbed. However, the measurement of the aforementioned width is not well defined in the BFC, presenting subjectivity. Thus, the objective of this study is to objectively delineate the width of the regular riverbed. For this, images obtained with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) were used, applying image segmentation techniques and the Voronoi diagram. The experiment was carried out in a stretch of the Uberabinha River, Minas Gerais. The region of APP measured with this method showed differences of 5.18% in relation to APP obtained by conventional techniques, which disregard the gutter the regular bed of water bodies. The advantage of the proposed method is in eliminating the subjectivity of conventional techniques, which use a approximation for this measure.