Vision-based approach to automate spraying in crop fields

This paper presents an approach to the vision tasks to be performed in a vehicle navigation application in crop fields. The objective is to automate chemical spraying by autonomous navigation and machine vision. A camera is used as the sensor del ice and a bar of spraying nozzles is provided to perform the spraying. The proposed solution consists of recovering maps of the environment from the image sequence, and exploring them to locate the path to follow and the nozzles that have to be switched on. The motion parameters of the vehicle are used to place the images in the map, and are computed from a feature tracking method. The plants and the weeds are identified through a segmentation, the features to be tracked are computed from the contours of the plants. Results with real image sequences of ail the steps involved are presented.