Anyone here keen to work on some OpenCV projects? I’d like to build a weeder that can do in row weeding by recognising the plants and weaving in between them, but I think I’d need a support network to bounce ideas off.
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In 2018 (before I knew of AOG) I worked on a DIY vision (OpenCV) autosteer project as part of a small group for our 4th year engineering capstone project. The project was basically a servo motor with friction wheel mounted to the steering column, a webcam mounted to the front of the tractor, and a DIY tablet containing a touch screen, raspberry Pi, arduino nano, and a motor driver. I took several vision processing classes during that time.
This project was September-April and was meant to follow rows of corn. Obviously there isn’t much corn grown during that time period in North America. We no-tilled some corn in October and took a bunch of video footage with an ATV of driving through the corn field to gather data for processing before the snow came. I have about a terabyte a bunch of that data if you want it and have a way for me to get it to you. I’ll post some stills later. I’m sure it’ll be the wrong angle for you but maybe I can put together a nice sample for you to play with.
We were able to demonstrate that the tractor/camera could follow lines painted on the road, and we were able to demonstrate that our vision algorithm produced the same kind of cross track error information when we fed it our corn data. We were never able to field test it and it definitely wasn’t at all field ready, but the basic systems were successfully demonstrated.
The algorithm was not much more than filter the feed to a specific colour, create a histogram of interesting pixels in the x direction, find the median of the histogram. I can’t remember which colour space we ended up using but using the correct space was key to success.
I think cultivator shifting to keep the cultivator on the row is quite expensive to purchase from manufacturers and I think it would not be very difficult to DIY.
Since 2018 I have only worked with vision in industrial automation settings, I have not touched OpenCV since then.
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may i suggest a front mounted weeder on a tractor then that is controlled via the steering wheels
agopen should work perfect for that
@davidroberts30 Unless I misunderstood you, that would only be between the rows. Also, without headaches, it would require a decent line at planting. Not such a problem if I’m the one who plants the crop because I’d be thinking about the following steps. Sometimes I have some older gentlemen driving who don’t much care for the time it takes to set up the machinery.
I’m after identifying the void between plants, and sending a hoe inside. If you’re familiar with a Garford weeder its like that.
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That sounds awesome. I’d appreciate any advice you can give me. I’ve found the learning curve absolutely punishing. Even finding information/tutorials.
My goal is to build a machine like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaxwJQ0_FwM
I’m a toolmaker by trade, so have the steel side of things sorted. But programming, thats a new thing to learn.
If your data fits this project, perhaps I can purchase some online storage for you to upload it to?
My advice would be to start simple and leave the steel to last. Get a raspberry Pi and a camera module and some green masking tape and set it all on your desk.
I just had a look and its 28gb of data. That’s too much for the cloud services that I subscribe to, but maybe you have somewhere that I can upload them to? The data is half video, half extracted stills from the video, so basically 15gb is duplicate data. Below are some sample stills. Data was 30 fps at 5-6 mph. Samples taken on 2 dates at different growing stages.
This might be a basic question, but how did you get started with computer vision?
Every tutorial I check out seems to start in the middle
I’m not sure that I can be of any use to you on that front, my introduction was “Introduction to digital image processing” class at school.
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