DeeplabV3+-based navigation line extraction for the sunlight robust combine harvester

Abstract

Visual navigation is widely used in intelligent combine harvesters, but the existing algorithms do not have sufficiently high accuracy of the visual navigation line recognition under different sunlight conditions. To address this problem, this article proposes a sunlight-robust DeepLabV3+-based navigation line extraction method for combine harvesters. The navigation lines are extracted by constructing a new dataset and predicting the boundaries of the areas that have been and have not been cut. To address the problem that DeeplabV3+ is not sufficient light in the DCNN part, improvement is proposed by incorporating the MobileNetV2 module. In image segmentation, the prediction time is 22.5 ms, and the mean intersection over union ( FMIOU) is 0.79. After image segmentation, the navigation lines are drawn using the line segment detection algorithm for the harvester. The proposed method is compared with other mainstream networks, and the prediction results are compared using the line segment detection method. The results show that this method can more quickly identify the navigation lines under different conditions of sunlight with less labeled data than the improved U-Net and DeeplabV3+, which uses Xception as the backbone. Compared to the traditional method and the improved U-Net, this method achieves good results and improves the recognition speed by 27 and 9 ms, respectively.