Cadastral digitization made easy with PIX4Dmatic

Under the leadership of José Alfredo Betancourt, JAB Visual has been innovating with drones in Colombia for over 13 years. As pioneers in the industry, they have developed projects that combine precision, speed, and efficiency. In their mission to modernize land registry systems and boost tourism, they undertook a challenging project in Jardín, Antioquia, using PIX4Dmatic to transform how territorial information is managed.

The challenge: digitizing a municipality for territorial and tourism planning

Jardín, located in southwestern Antioquia (Colombia), is a municipality that blends a rich architectural heritage with breathtaking natural landscapes. The town is characterized by traditional architecture, featuring adobe and rammed-earth constructions, many of which have clay tile roofs and wooden structures. While visually charming, these buildings pose challenges for cadastral updates due to unregistered modifications and the lack of precise documentation regarding expansions or structural changes.

View of the municipality of Jardín in Antioquia (Colombia)

Additionally, the municipality’s irregular topography has shaped its urban growth, with houses built on steep slopes and narrow streets that make access to certain areas difficult. This, combined with the absence of updated maps, makes digitizing the territory a crucial challenge for infrastructure planning and management. This complicates the efficient updating and administration of the cadastre.

The goal of the project was to generate a detailed 3D model of the municipality as part of a territorial and tourism planning initiative. The model would be used to analyze the current state of the buildings and their integration into the environment.

Thanks to PIX4Dmatic, a large amount of data was collected and processed quickly and accurately, eliminating the challenges associated with traditional field measurement methods. The main challenge was field visits: the combination of mountainous terrain with hard-to-reach areas, along with constant rainfall that limited data collection efforts, made inspections tedious, time-consuming, and costly.

Careful planning was needed to avoid interference with local tourism activities like paragliding during drone flights. Here, PIX4Dmatic played a key role, enabling the fast and precise digitization of the municipality without the need for constant field presence.

Precision, speed, and results with PIX4Dmatic

PIX4Dmatic not only allowed JAB Visual to reduce fieldwork time and costs drastically but also improved the management of the cadastral and territorial information. Instead of relying on endless on-site inspections, the team was able to create an accurate historical record of the municipality’s evolution, providing detailed and reliable data for strategic decision-making.

What truly made the difference was the power of the software: the ability to process large volumes of images in record time enabled 2,254 photographs to be converted into a detailed 3D model in just 6 hours. The generation of high-quality videos helped visualize the territory immersively, while advanced automatic detection tools accurately identified roads, sewer systems, drainage, and utility poles without manual intervention.

Key functionalities such as volume calculation streamlined the model creation process, reducing the margin of error and ensuring high-precision results.

Point cloud of the Jardin project in PIX4Dmatic

“PIX4Dmatic offers us precision, speed, and ease of use. With a single software suite, we can extract valuable information for tourism, risk management, and urban planning in a matter of hours.” José Alfredo Betancourt, Operational Manager, JAB Visual Ltda.

The case of JAB Visual is clear proof of how the right technology can completely transform the way we manage territory. What was once a slow, costly, and uncertain process is now an efficient, digitized workflow with precise data in record time.

PIX4Dmatic not only optimized data capture and processing but also paved the way for a new era in cadastral updates and urban planning in Antioquia. Thanks to its ability to convert thousands of images into a high-precision 3D model, JAB Visual successfully generated key information for strategic decision-making, enabling more effective management of Jardín’s development.