Crop-row detector for row-following control systems (part 1) --comparison and evaluation of detecting systems

摘要

The purpose of this study is to develop a crop-row detector which can be applied to row-following control systems. In this paper, the method for crop-row detection was developed. In this method, first, a crop-row image is divided into far and near fields of vision, and brightness (Green and Red) of pixels is integrated vertically. Secondly, integrated values are calculated (G-R or G/R). As a result, peaks of these graphs correspond to positions of crop, and a line drawn from far peak point to nearpeak point becomes the detected crop-row. In the experiment on crop-row detection, two systems were tested. One is the line-sensor system (hardware processing system) that was designed for this study, and the other is the area-sensor system (softwareprocessing system) that was assembled from general devices such as a CCD camera. As a result, the software processing system was superior to the hardware processing system. The software processing system would be accurate and fast enough for practicaluse, though some cases of wrong detection occurred.