Adaptive real-time crop row detection through enhancing a traditional computer vision approach

Abstract

Crop row detection is important to enable precise management of fields and optimize the use of resources such as fertilizers and water. Autonomous machines need an effective but also robust real-time row detection system to be able to adapt to different field conditions. In this paper, we present an enhanced crop row detection approach which integrates traditional computer vision methods with further techniques such as k-means clustering or probabilistic Hough transformation. The resulting hybrid method allows for efficient and robust detection of straight and curved crop rows in image and video material. We validate our approach empirically on the crop row benchmark dataset (CRBD) and compare it with other state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our approach is designed to be adaptive and thus becomes straightforwardly transferable to other experimental setups. To corroborate that, we report on results when our approach is validated on representative corner cases which have been collected in the scope of a research project. Observations and current limitations of our approach are discussed along with possible solutions to overcome them in future work.