Binocular stereo vision applied to harvesting robots

Abstract

A measurement of 3D locations of ripe tomatoes by binocular stereo vision was done for harvesting tomatoes in greenhouse.In this method,a pair of stereo images were obtained by stereo cameras,which were then transformed to gray images.According to the gray correlation,corresponding points of stereo images were searched,and a depth image was obtained by calculating distances between tomatoes and stereo cameras based on triangulation principle.The center of tomato was extracted by distinguishing a tomato from background with image processing.The 3D locations of ripe tomatoes were obtained by comparing coordinate values of the center of tomato with the depth image.The error of depth is within ±20 mm when distance is less than 1 000 mm.