Review on Application of Binocular Vision Technology in Field Obstacle Detection

Abstract

Obstacles within the field are the main external source of safety hazard in field operation of agricultural machineries. Autonomous obstacle avoidance is a critical technology to be solved for the robotization of field operation by agricultural machineries. For this technology, a critical premise is to timely and accurately perceive static and dynamic information of field obstacles. Firstly, this paper describes main detection parameters of field obstacles. Whereafter, by compared with other detection technologies, applicability of binocular vision-based detection technology in field obstacle detection is analyzed. Afterwards, this paper summarizes the whole process of binocular vision-based obstacle detection into three steps. For step one, main detecting methods for locating obstacles in images, main principles of these methods and their applicability in field operation scene are discussed. For step two, main existing methods for detecting spatial position parameters of obstacles based on detection results of step one and their application status in field operation scene are summarized. For step three, typical target tracking methods for obtaining the motion state of obstacles are compared and summarized, and their reference value for future research is pointed out. At last, the main challenges of detecting obstacles in field scene based on binocular vision are summarized.