Guidance Line Extraction for Autonomous Weeding robot based-on Rice Morphology Characteristic in Wet Paddy

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a new algorithm of the guidance line extraction for autonomous weeding robot based on infrared vision sensor in wet paddy. It is the critical process for guidance line extraction which finds the central point or area of rice row. In order to improve accuracy of the guidance line, we are trying to use the morphological characteristics of rice that the direction of rice leaves have convergence to central area of rice row. Using Hough transform, we were represented the curved leaves as a combination of segmented straight lines on binary image that has been skeletonized and segmented object. A slope of the guidance line was gotten as calculate the average slope of all segmented lines. An initial point of the guidance line was determined that is the maximum pixel value of the accumulated white columns of a binary image which is rotated the slope of guidance line in the opposite direction. We also have verified an accuracy of the proposed algorithm by experiments in the real wet paddy.