Depth estimation system suitable for hardware design

Depth estimation is an active research area with the developing of stereo vision in recent years. It is one of the key technologies to resolve the large data of stereo vision communication. Now depth estimation still has some problems, such as occlusion, fuzzy edge, real-time processing, etc. Many algorithms have been proposed base on software, however the performance of the computer configurations limits the software processing speed. The other resolution is hardware design and the great developments of the digital signal processor （DSP）, and application specific integrated circuit （ASIC） and field programmable gate array （FPGA） provide the opportunity of flexible applications. In this work, by analyzing the procedures of depth estimation, the proper algorithms which can be used in hardware design to execute real-time depth estimation are proposed. The different methods of calibration, matching and post-processing are analyzed based on the hardware design requirements. At last some tests for the algorithm have been analyzed. The results show that the algorithms proposed for hardware design can provide credited depth map for further view synthesis and are suitable for hardware design.

Tractor path tracking control based on binocular vision

In the process of field operation management,determining how to accurately realize crop row identification and path tracking control is an essential part of tractor automatic navigation.According to the linear operation in the process of cotton field management,the tractor path tracking control system was designed based on binocular vision and the pure pursuit model.A new crop row detection method based on the Census transform and the PID control algorithm with dead zone were used.First,the upper computer software was developed by C++with the functions of parameter setting and image acquisition and processing.Second,an automatic steering controller was developed based on microprocessor MC9S12XS128 of Freescale.The control program was developed based on modular design using CodeWarrior during development of the PID-based automatic steering control strategy.Finally,a field experiment platform of tractor path tracking control was built,and field experiments under the actual cotton were conducted.The optimal visibility distance was determined by several previous experiments.When the tractor tracks the path with the optimal visibility distance in the growth environment of actual cotton crops,the mean absolute deviation of course angle was 0.95°,and the standard deviation was 1.26°;the mean absolute deviation of lateral position was 4.00 cm,and the standard deviation was 4.97 cm;the mean absolute deviation of front wheel angle was 2.99°,and the standard deviation was 3.67°.The experimental results show that(1)the crop row detection method based on Census transform can identify the crop line and plan the navigation path well,and(2)the tractor path tracking control system based on binocular vision has good stability and high control precision;thus,the control systemcan realize the automatic path tracking control of cotton line operation and meets the agricultural requirements of cotton field operation management.

Design and test of stem diameter inspection spherical robot

Stem diameter is an important parameter in the process of plant growth which can indicate the growth state and moisture content of the plant,its automatic detection is necessary.Traditional devices have many drawbacks that limit their practical uses in general case.To solve those problems,a stem diameter inspection spherical robot was developed in this study.The particular mechanism of the robot has turned out to be suitable for performing monitoring tasks in greenhouse mainly due to its spherical shape,small size,low weight and traction system that do not produce soil compacting or erosion.The mechanical structure and hardware architecture of the spherical robot were described,the algorithm based on binocular stereo vision was developed to measure the stem diameter of the plant.The effectiveness of the prototype robot was confirmed by field experiments in a tomato greenhouse.The results showed that the machine measurement data was linearly correlated with the manual measurement data with R^(2) of 0.9503.There was no significant difference for each attribute between machine measurement data and manual measurement data(sig>0.05).The results showed that this method was feasible for nondestructive testing of the stem diameter of greenhouse plants.

Improved image denoising via RAISR with fewer filters

In recent years,accurate Gaussian noise removal has attracted considerable attention for mobile applications,as in smart phones.Accurate conventional denoising methods have the potential ability to improve denoising performance with no additional time.Therefore,we propose a rapid post-processing method for Gaussian noise removal in this paper.Block matching and 3D filtering and weighted nuclear norm minimization are utilized to suppress noise.Although these nonlocal image denoising methods have quantitatively high performance,some fine image details are lacking due to the loss of high frequency information.To tackle this problem,an improvement to the pioneering RAISR approach(rapid and accurate image super-resolution),is applied to rapidly post-process the denoised image.It gives performance comparable to state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques at low computational cost,preserving important image structures well.Our modification is to reduce the hash classes for the patches extracted from the denoised image and the pixels from the ground truth to 18 filters by two improvements:geometric conversion and reduction of the strength classes.In addition,following RAISR,the census transform is exploited by blending the image processed by noise removal methods with the filtered one to achieve artifact-free results.Experimental results demonstrate that higher quality and more pleasant visual results can be achieved than by other methods,efficiently and with low memory requirements.