摘要：AbstractFurrow irrigation, which is conducted by creating parallel channels along the field length, is a cultivation method widely used for growing row crops such as hot pepper, garlic, soybean and tree crops. These artificially structured parallel channels, commonly referred to as ridge-furrow, can provide guidance to autonomous tractors with its characteristic of undulating surface. This study reports the development of a stereovision-based guidance line detection system applicable to ridge-furrow cropping fields. The algorithm implemented in the detection system consisted of two different phases, i.e., splitting depth images into two parts (ridge and furrow) and extracting a guidance line from the split images. Through the image binarization method based on a distance transform and image segmentation method, the depth image was divided into two regions of ridge and furrow and the boundary points of each region were then detected. The second phase extracted a guidance line from the detected boundary points based on linear regression. The guidance lines detected by the developed algorithm were compared with those manually labelled, and the results were RMSEs of 0.02 m and 0.63 degree in lateral deviation and heading angle, respectively. Further, the stereo camera was installed on a tractor and field tests were proceeded on a straight and regularly spaced ridge and furrow field. As a result, the RMSE of lateral deviation measured by a RTK-GPS was 1.37 cm at 3 km/s.
