Building perspective models to guide a row crop navigation vehicle

To fully automate some in-field agricultural tasks, an autonomous vehicle has to be guided along a crop field. In this work, we describe how a vision system extracts the guidance information for vehicle navigation in a crop row. The method is based on extraction of the scene structure from perspective information that a set of coplanar parallel lines, representing the crop rows, generate in the image. To solve some drawbacks caused by these natural environments, a method to extract the row lines is described, and an approach to calculate the vanishing point proposed. A technique to recover missing information is also introduced. The method has been applied to long sequences of images taken by a moving vehicle in crop row scenes.

[1]  Matthew Turk,et al.  VITS-A Vision System for Autonomous Land Vehicle Navigation , 1988, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[2]  Nirwan Ansari,et al.  Steering a robot with vanishing points , 1993, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[3]  Josef Kittler,et al.  Vanishing point detection , 1993, Image Vis. Comput..

[4]  Filiberto Pla,et al.  Recognition of Partial Circular Shapes from Segmented Contours , 1996, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[5]  Paul C. K. Kwok,et al.  A thinning algorithm by contour generation , 1988, CACM.

[6]  Jake K. Aggarwal,et al.  Determining vanishing points from perspective images , 1984, Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process..

[7]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  Vision and Navigation for the Carnegie-Mellon Navlab , 1987 .

[8]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  Clustering Methodologies in Exploratory Data Analysis , 1980, Adv. Comput..

[9]  J. A. Marchant,et al.  Segmentation of plants and weeds for a precision crop protection robot using infrared images , 1996 .

[10]  Tod S. Levitt,et al.  Terrain models for an autonomous land vehicle , 1986, Proceedings. 1986 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[11]  Paul G. Ducksbury.  Parallel Texture Region Segmentation using a Pearl Bayes Network , 1993, BMVC.

[12]  Olivier D. Faugeras,et al.  Building, Registrating, and Fusing Noisy Visual Maps , 1988, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[13]  Saburo Tsuji,et al.  Visual Path Planning by a Mobile Robot , 1987, IJCAI.

[14]  C. Coelho,et al.  Extraction of vanishing points from images of indoor and outdoor scenes , 1993, Image Vis. Comput..

[15]  J. F. Reid,et al.  An Algorithm for Separating Guidance Information from Row Crop Images , 1988 .

[16]  Roland T. Chin,et al.  One-Pass Parallel Thinning: Analysis, Properties, and Quantitative Evaluation , 1992, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[17]  Takeo Kanade,et al.  First Results in Robot Road-Following , 1985, IJCAI.

[18]  Charles E. Thorpe,et al.  SCARF: a color vision system that tracks roads and intersections , 1993, IEEE Trans. Robotics Autom..

[19]  Long Quan,et al.  Determining perspective structures using hierarchical Hough transform , 1989, Pattern Recognit. Lett..

[20]  Saburo Tsuji,et al.  Panoramic representation for route recognition by a mobile robot , 1992, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[21]  Filiberto Pla,et al.  Colour segmentation based on a light reflection model to locate citrus fruits for robotic harvesting , 1993 .

[22]  Ramesh Jain,et al.  Road Following Using Vanishing Point , 1987 .