Abstract:[Objective] Soil erosion rate of mineland dump slope was estimated using high resolution image of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV) which provided a new method to estimate the soil erosion rate in the area without long-term topography monitoring.[Methods] The images of study area and spatial coordinates of the ground control points were acquired using UAV and RTK-GPS, respectively. The dense point clouds and high resolution digital elevation models(DEMs) were generated using Agisoft PhotoScan Professional 1.1.2 and Arc GIS 10.3, respectively. Upon which, the soil erosion rate was estimated by visual imagery interpretation and field survey.[Results] The soil erosion area and soil erosion volume in the mineland dump slope were estimated at 11 052.53 m2 and 835.41 m3, respectively. The soil erosion rate was estimated at 4 043.82 t/(km2·a). The RMSE of the DEM was 0.26 m using Ordinary Kriging method.[Conclusion] The soil erosion rate of the study area belonged to middle soil erosion, which were thought consisted with factual situations. And hence, the precision of DEM satisfied the request of the study. Although no significant differences in the DEM accuracy could be found among various interpolation methods due to the high density of cloud data, Ordinary Kriging performed best among different interpolation methods.