Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Wavelet Analysis and Pattern Recognition, Qingdao, 11-14 July 2010

A MACHINE VISION BASED CROP ROWS DETECTION FOR

AGRICULTURAL ROBOTS
GUO-QUAN JIANG1, CUI-JUN ZHAO2, YONG-SHENG SI3
1
School of Computer Science and Technology, Henan Polytechnic University, Jiaozuo 454000, China
2
School of Resources and Environment Engineering, Henan Polytechnic University, Jiaozuo 454000, China
3
College of Information Science & Technology, Agricultural University of Hebei, Baoding 071001, China
E-MAIL: jiangguoquan@hpu.edu.cn, zhaocuijun@hpu.edu.cn, siyongsheng@hotmail.com

Abstract: threshold, the research of the midpoints of the rows, the

One approach of navigating agricultural robots to perform
different kinds of operations such as weeding, spraying and
fertilizing is using a machine vision based row detection system.
A new method for robust recognition of crop rows is presented.
First, image pre-processing was used to obtain the binarization
image; second, the binarization image was divided into several
row segments, which created less data points while still reserved
information of crop rows; third, vertical projection method was
presented to estimate the position of the crop rows for image
strips; and last the crop rows were detected by Hough transform.
The algorithm requires 70ms to determine all the crop rows.
Experimental results show that this approach can quickly and
accurately find the crop rows even under different light
conditions.
Keywords:
Machine vision; Hough transform; Guidance; Crop rows
1. Introduction
Researchers have been interested in developing
automated guidance for agricultural machinery since the early
days of the tractor; this interest has increased recently
because of the advent of precision agriculture, the emergence
of which has been mainly attributed to the advances in
computers and sensors [1].
Many studies to find the guidance directrix with the
image processing techniques have been reported. Reid and
Searcy [2] used a Bayes classifier to find the optimal
threshold for segmenting near-infrared images of crop rows
for obtaining guidance information. Kusano et al. [3] used a
principal component analysis and the HIS transform in the
binary image to extract the crop rows. Yu and Jain [4] used
Hough transform to detect line boundaries of a road using
images captured by a camera on an agricultural vehicle.
Rovira-Mas et al. [5] detected two crop rows in five steps
including the definition of a region of interest (to limit the
computation load), the image binarization using an adaptive
computation of the Hough transform and a connectivity
analysis. Tijmen Bakker [6] selected three rectangular
sections of crop row spacing, and then he summed up the
grey values of the sections and used the grey-scale Hough
transform to find the row.
However, the crop rows detection rate is not very
satisfied. When the line detection algorithm is used for
finding crop rows, computational requirements are one of the
main limitations for autonomous navigation. Therefore the
goal of the present work is to develop a new method which
can detect crop rows to guide agricultural robots to work in
real time even under a wide range of illumination situations.
2. Material and method
2.1. Material
The Daheng DH-CG300 Image Acquisition Cards and a
KOKO Colour CCD Camera were used to obtain sample
wheat images. The resolution of image was 400300 pixels.
The focal length of the camera lens was 16cm. Image
processing was performed using a personal computer having
a Pentium 1.8 GHz CPU 256MB RAM.
Sampling operations were performed at the experimental
farm of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The
camera was located 110 cm above ground and tilted at an
angle of 30to the vertical. The wheat height ranged from 5
to 12cm. The area covered by one image was 2.6m long in
row direction and 1.0m wide.
2.2. Grey scale transform
The colour image was transformed into a grey image by
the processing of emphasizing the green value and restraining
the red and blue value. As for wheat image, the green value
was larger than the red and blue value. The

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 Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Wavelet Analysis and Pattern Recognition, Qingdao, 11-14 July 2010
2G R B transform model is used. Its principle is shown as
formula (1).
0 2G R+B
pixel ( x, y ) = 2G R-B other (1)
255 2G R + B + 255
Where G, R, B are equal to the green, red and blue
value of po int( x, y ) respectively in the colour image,
pixel ( x, y ) denotes the grey value of po int( x, y ) in the
grey image, and confined to [0, 255].
Compared with other possible colour channel
combinations this method is reported to yield good results
(Woebbecke et al., 1995), and has been proved to work well
for the present image (Figure 2). It has worked well for a
wide range of illumination conditions, ranging from bright
sunlight to a totally overcast sky.
Figure 1. Original image Figure 2. Grey scale image
2.3. Image binarization
In order to eliminate the noise and to reduce the number
of pixels to be processed, a binarization process was applied.
Among the global thresholding techniques, the Sahoo et al.
(1988) study concluded that the Otsu method was one of the
best threshold selection methods for general real world
images with respect to uniformity and shape measures. The
basic principle of Otsu is looking for an optimal threshold
value to divide grey-level histogram of an image into two
parts on the condition that between-cluster variance is
maximal [7]. Figure 3 showed the result of binarization with
Otsu algorithm.
2.4. Image division and estimation of centre points of the
crop row
Hough Transform has often been used to determine rows.
But the standard HT has difficulty in meeting the real-time
need because of its drawback in dealing with complex data.
To reduce the data involved, this study adopted image
division method. The binarization image is divided into a
number of horizontal strips as shown in Figure 4. In principle
(with the exception of crop serious absent), the number of
strips may be equal to the number of pixel rows in the image
but in order to reduce the amount of subsequent computations
it may be feasible to let each strip consist of more than one
pixel row [8]. Vertical projection method is used for obtaining
the centre of the row for each image strip.
Here, several statistical formulas were used. Suppose
that the resolution of image is M N pixels. The image
strip size is M h . I (i, j ) is the grey value of the pixel in
position (i, j ) , s ( j ) is the result of summation of column j ,
m is the mean grey value of the whole image strip, thus,
h
s ( j ) = I (i, j ) j = 1, 2," M (2)
i =1
M
1
m=
M
s( j )
j =1
j = 1, 2," M (3)
Figure 3. Binarization Figure 4. Image division
Figure 5b shows the grey values distribution of each
column. Its clear to see the grey values of crops
neighborhood are higher than the background. Hereby, the
up-point and down-point would be detected by way of the
differential method. Relying on concrete threshold rule, the
left and right edge of crop row can be obtained, and then the
midpoint of the edges indicating of the centres of the crop
rows would be found. The concrete algorithm can be
described as follows:
(1) Compute vertical grey values s ( j ) of each image
strip;
(2) Select an appropriate grey threshold Tg ,
if s ( j ) Tg , then s ( j ) = h ; otherwise s ( j ) = 0 . Here, the
threshold Tg is replaced by the mean m ;
(3) Calculate differential Diff ( j ) for the above step
(2);
(4) Judge the crops left and right edges. If Diff ( j ) > 0 ,
then the column j is up-point (crops left edge), record the
value of j ; on the contrary, if Diff ( j ) < 0 , then the column
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j is down-point (crops right edge), also, record the value

of j ;
Division of binarization image
(5) Give a distance threshold Td , Dud denotes the
distance between up-point and down-point. If Dud Td , this
pair of up and down points are treated as localization points; Vertical sum of grey values
the midpoint of both points means localizations abscissa. s( j) for each strip
Usually, suppose the vertical coordinate
yi = (i 1/ 2) * h, i = 1, 2," , N . As a result, the centres of No Yes
s( j) >Tg
crop rows can be obtained; otherwise, if Dud < Td , the point
pairs are not localization points, will be discarded. This step
will end up with all up-points and down-points are judged. s( j) = 0 s( j) = h
(6) Compute the midpoint of localization points. The
Differiential Diff( j)
midpoint is the centre of the crop row.
(7) End the process until the last strip is computed over.
The detailed process can be seen clearly from Figure 5.
<0 >0
(a) Diff( j) 0

j is down-point j is up-point

Distance Dud between the

up-point and the down-point

No Yes
Dud >Td

Compute the midpoint between

Give up
the up-point and the down-point

Crop row's vertical coordinate

Crop row's abscissa
= (i 1 2)*h

Crop row's localization point

Figure 6. Flow-chart of localization of the centre of the row

2.5. Crop rows detection

(f)
Figure 5. Estimation of the target points according to vertical projection.
(a) Strip No.4 from the binarization image.
(b) Vertical sum of grey values in the strip.
(c) Grey values after thresholding.
(d) Differential processing of Figure (c).
(e). Result of removing the fault localization points.
(f). Detection result of localization points (token *).
The flow-chart of the algorithm is shown in Figure 6.
The Hough transform (HT) is a popular tool for line
detection due to its robustness to noise and missing data [10].
As has been described before, the data sets were decreased
obviously owing to the adoption of the use of vertical
projection. Here, HT is employed to detect multi crop rows.
It is assumed that the orientation of the agricultural
robots with respect to the crop rows will never exceed 60.
Therefore, the implemented Hough transform calculates the
accumulator values only for lines with between 30 and
150 in steps of 1

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3. Results and discussion
3.1. Results
Use a serial of wheat field images at different growth
stages and in different light conditions to test the algorithm.
Figure 7 is a typical image obtained in a cloudy day. Image
size is 400h300 pixels. Practical experience has shown that
division of the image into approximately 10 strips is suitable.
Each strip size is 400h30 pixels.
Using the algorithm as mentioned above, the detected
crop rows has shown in Figure 7. Corresponding equations in
image coordinate can be obtained as follows:
yleft = 4.7046 x + 428.0664 ;
ymiddle = 14.3007 x + 3067.8000 ;
yright = 7.1154 x 217.0000
Figure 7. Detection of multi crop rows
3.2. Discussion
If the rows and inter-row spaces could be segmented
clearly, crop rows could also be detected easily. Within the
growth of wheat, the rows became overlapped and more and
more canopies grew together. Sometimes the field had narrow
inter-row spaces which made it difficult to reliably
discriminate all of the rows in view. Under these
circumstances, the crop rows could not be detected
satisfactorily. In addition, it is obvious that a great amount of
weeds between the crop rows will disturb the row detection
algorithm.
4. Conclusions
(1) For green crops, the green value is larger than that of
red and blue, the 2G-R-B transform model can convert all
colour images into grey scale images efficiently and
effectively.
(2) In order to increase the image-processing speed,
firstly, image division was presented, the binarization image
was divided several horizontal image strips; and then, the
centres of crop rows for each strip were obtained by grey
level accumulation in vertical direction.
(3) HT was used for crop rows detection, because it is a
robust algorithm even in the crop absent.
(4) The detection algorithm consumed 70ms to process a
colour image with 400h300 pixels in the PC with a 1.8.GHz
CPU.
Experiment has approved the algorithm could detect all
the centrelines under different weather conditions. However,
if the wheat canopies became too close or the inter-row space
was too narrow, the centrelines of the rows were not
satisfactory. Therefore, how to use crops' other information to
effectively extract crop rows is the important work for next
step.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the doctorial fund
(Grant No. B2010-27).
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