A Novel Method for 2-D Agricultural Soil Roughness Characterization Based on a Laser Scanning Technique

In this paper we present a laser profiler, whose main aim is the determination of agricultural soil roughness. Its working principle is based on the acquisition of an image of an object illuminated by a laser beam and on the use of 3D computer vision techniques to obtain the reconstruction of the scanned object. One of the most important purposes of this device is the attainment of the soil RMS height (s) and the correlation length (l) related to the autocorrelation function. These are fundamental inputs to derive soil moisture maps from soil backscattering data.