BUILDING PERSPECTIVE MODELS TO GUIDE A ROW CROP NAVIGATION VEHICLE

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