Opium Poppy Detection Using Deep Learning

Opium poppies are a major source of traditional drugs, which are not only harmful to physical and mental health, but also threaten the economy and society. Monitoring poppy cultivation in key regions through remote sensing is therefore a crucial task; the location coordinates of poppy parcels represent particularly important information for their eradication by local governments. We propose a new methodology based on deep learning target detection to identify the location of poppy parcels and map their spatial distribution. We first make six training datasets with different band combinations and slide window sizes using two ZiYuan3 (ZY3) remote sensing images and separately train the single shot multibox detector (SSD) model. Then, we choose the best model and test its performance using 225 km(2) verification images from Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), which exhibits a precision of 95% for a recall of 85%. The speed of our method is 4.5 km(2)/s on 1080TI Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This study is the first attempt to monitor opium poppies with the deep learning method and achieve a high recognition rate. Our method does not require manual feature extraction and provides an alternative way to rapidly obtain the exact location coordinates of opium poppy cultivation patches.