Crop line detection in the field using AI for autonomous driving between crops

Abstract

The autonomous driving tractors were developed and utilized in the fields for farming in recent years to solve the problem of the shortage of farmers in Japan. The global positing system (GPS) is mainly used for the autonomous driving system for which can provide absolute positioning information in the outdoor fields. However, in the conditions of adjacent buildings or trees such as windbreaks the position error of the GPS localization receiver can be several meters, which is impossible to be used for precise autonomous driving while spraying operation etc. Therefore, a local sensor such as a camera is expected to be developed to solve the problem. In this paper, a color camera that was mounted at the front of a tractor was utilized to capture images in a corn field. In addition, the crops were detected using an artificial intelligence (AI) model - single short multibox detector (SSD). The crop line was detected using Hough transform.