Sensors 2011, 11(7), 7095-7109; doi:10.3390/s110707095
Article

Mapping Wide Row Crops with Video Sequences Acquired from a Tractor Moving at Treatment Speed

Nadir Sainz-Costa 1 email, Angela Ribeiro 1,* email, Xavier P. Burgos-Artizzu 2 email, María Guijarro 3 email and Gonzalo Pajares 3 email
1 Centre for Automation and Robotics, CSIC-UPM, Arganda del Rey, 28500 Madrid, Spain 2 Computation and Neural Systems, 136-93, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 3 Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Computer Science, Complutense University, 28040 Madrid, Spain
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 6 April 2011; in revised form: 4 July 2011 / Accepted: 6 July 2011 / Published: 11 July 2011
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors in Agriculture and Forestry)
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Abstract: This paper presents a mapping method for wide row crop fields. The resulting map shows the crop rows and weeds present in the inter-row spacing. Because field videos are acquired with a camera mounted on top of an agricultural vehicle, a method for image sequence stabilization was needed and consequently designed and developed. The proposed stabilization method uses the centers of some crop rows in the image sequence as features to be tracked, which compensates for the lateral movement (sway) of the camera and leaves the pitch unchanged. A region of interest is selected using the tracked features, and an inverse perspective technique transforms the selected region into a bird’s-eye view that is centered on the image and that enables map generation. The algorithm developed has been tested on several video sequences of different fields recorded at different times and under different lighting conditions, with good initial results. Indeed, lateral displacements of up to 66% of the inter-row spacing were suppressed through the stabilization process, and crop rows in the resulting maps appear straight.
Keywords: crop mapping; video stabilization; inverse perspective mapping; video processing; precision agriculture

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Cite This Article

MDPI and ACS Style

Sainz-Costa, N.; Ribeiro, A.; Burgos-Artizzu, X.P.; Guijarro, M.; Pajares, G. Mapping Wide Row Crops with Video Sequences Acquired from a Tractor Moving at Treatment Speed. Sensors 2011, 11, 7095-7109.

AMA Style

Sainz-Costa N, Ribeiro A, Burgos-Artizzu XP, Guijarro M, Pajares G. Mapping Wide Row Crops with Video Sequences Acquired from a Tractor Moving at Treatment Speed. Sensors. 2011; 11(7):7095-7109.

Chicago/Turabian Style

Sainz-Costa, Nadir; Ribeiro, Angela; Burgos-Artizzu, Xavier P.; Guijarro, María; Pajares, Gonzalo. 2011. "Mapping Wide Row Crops with Video Sequences Acquired from a Tractor Moving at Treatment Speed." Sensors 11, no. 7: 7095-7109.

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