An improved particle filtering to locate the crop boundary of an unharvested region using vision

Purpose Accurately, positioning is a fundamental requirement for vision measurement systems. The calculation of the harvesting width can not only help farmers adjust the direction of the intelligent harvesting robot in time but also provide data support for future unmanned vehicles. Design/methodology/approach To make the length of each pixel equal, the image is restored to the aerial view in the world coordinate system. To solve the problem of too much calculation caused by too many particles, a certain number of particles are scattered near the crop boundary and the distribution regularities of particles’ weight are analyzed. Based on the analysis, a novel boundary positioning method is presented. In the meantime, to improve the robustness of the algorithm, the back-projection algorithm is also used for boundary positioning. Findings Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method could well meet the precision and real-time requirements with the measurement error within 55 mm. Originality/value In visual target tracking, using particle filtering, a rectangular is used to track the target and cannot obtain the boundary information. This paper studied the distribution of the particle set near the crop boundary and proposed an improved particle filtering algorithm. In the algorithm, a small amount of particles is used to determine the crop boundary and accurate positioning of the crop boundary is realized.