3D Monitoring of Woody Crops Using a Medium-Sized Field Inspection Vehicle

Abstract

In this work, a crop inspection system is presented. A mobile platform, based on a commercial electric vehicle, is equipped with different on-board sensors to inspection annual crops (maize, cereal, etc.) and multi-annual crops (orchards, vineyards, etc.). The use of a low-cost RGB-D sensor, the Microsoft Kinect v2 sensor, for the inspection of woody crops is tested. A method to generate automatic 3D reconstructions of large areas, such as a complete crop row, from the information directly supplied by the RGB-D sensor is shown as well as a procedure to correct the drift that appears in the reconstruction of crop rows. All these methods were tested and validated in real fields at different times throughout 2016. The development presented in this paper is a promising technology to achieve better crop management, which will increase crop yield.