The use of remote sensing in identifying illegal poppy fields with an emphasis on investigating sources, extracting algorithms and implementing selected algorithms in Afghanistan

Today, remote sensing is an effective method for identifying drug crops, along with traditional methods such as field visits. This technology has been able to reduce the limitations of traditional methods and become efficient in spending money and energy. Numerous researches have been carried out in the field of identifying and extracting the area under poppy cultivation in the world, and due to the extent of these researches, the variety of data and methods used in them, it is necessary to collect and analyze them in an integrated manner. It can be useful and pave the way for future researches.

The upcoming research collects the previous researches that have been done in the field of identification of poppy cultivation using remote sensing method. After a comprehensive review of the articles, the algorithms used in them have been extracted, and as an example, two selected methods have been implemented in the regions of Afghanistan and Turkey.

Among the existing methods, two selected methods based on supervised and unsupervised classification with two views based on pixels and visual objects, as well as the use of a vegetation index, have been selected for implementation.

The implementation of these methods on areas of Afghanistan›s Helmand province and Gonen region in Turkey has shown that they have been able to with an average accuracy of more than %88 (the accuracy obtained in the studied cases is %83 ,%90.8 ,%80 and %97.8) identify poppy cultivation.