ZIYAN Launches AI-Enabled Poppy Surveillance Solution with F15 UAV

Illegal poppy cultivation has long posed a persistent challenge for law enforcement. Despite being strictly prohibited, sporadic cultivation continues to emerge in remote mountains, dense forests, rooftops, and hidden urban spaces. These crops are often scattered, concealed, and difficult to detect—making manual patrols both inefficient and unreliable. Conventional inspection methods are further hampered by terrain complexity, vast coverage areas, and human fatigue.

ZIYAN has introduced an AI-driven poppy surveillance solution that directly addresses these challenges. At the core of the system is the ZIYAN F15 unmanned helicopter, equipped with a high-definition gimbal camera and supported by a proprietary AI recognition platform. Together, they form a closed-loop operational workflow: aerial reconnaissance – AI data analysis – precise geo-tagging – rapid enforcement.

Long-Endurance UAV: Expanding the Scope of Surveillance

The F15 UAV provides unmatched coverage capability. With a single-flight endurance of 100 minutes and a 30 km operational radius, the platform enables wide-area patrols with exceptional efficiency. Its onboard gimbal camera captures ultra-clear imagery with a ground sampling distance of 2.5 cm from 100 metres altitude, allowing detection of even small and dispersed plants across varied environments—from large-scale farmland to concealed rooftop cultivation.

AI Recognition: 95% Detection Accuracy

Captured imagery is processed by ZIYAN's AI Poppy Recognition System, which has been trained on extensive datasets of poppy growth across multiple stages and environments.

• Seedling-stage accuracy: ~90%

• Flowering and fruiting stages: >95%

The system automatically highlights suspected cultivation sites on digital maps, enabling law enforcement teams to navigate directly to the target coordinates for verification and eradication. This dramatically reduces the reliance on manual expertise while improving consistency and accuracy.

Proven Operational Efficiency: 300 Households in 8 Minutes

Field applications have demonstrated significant efficiency gains. A case study showed that while 20 officers previously required two hours to inspect a village of 300 households, the UAV + AI solution accomplished the same task in just 5–8 minutes—a 10–15x improvement in productivity.

Multi-Sector Applications

Beyond narcotics enforcement, ZIYAN's AI-enabled UAV solution has broader utility in other domains, including:

• Agriculture & Forestry: Detecting unauthorised crop cultivation in farms, orchards, and forested areas.

• Border and coastal surveillance UAV solution: Strengthening cross-border monitoring to prevent illegal crop proliferation.

• UAV inspection for energy infrastructure: Inspecting rooftops, balconies, and hidden residential spaces.

• Targeted Re-inspection: Conducting scheduled patrols of high-incidence areas.

By reducing manpower requirements and minimising operational risk in hazardous environments such as rugged mountains and dense forests, the solution enhances both safety and cost-effectiveness.

Towards an Intelligent Counter-Narcotics Future

ZIYAN's innovation marks a shift from manual to intelligent, precision-based counter-narcotics operations. As UAV platforms and AI algorithms continue to advance, the system will deliver even greater levels of automation, accuracy, and scalability.

With this pioneering integration of aerial robotics and artificial intelligence, ZIYAN is setting a new benchmark for technology-driven eradication of illicit crops, contributing to the vision of a cleaner, drug-free society.