A New Automatic Real-Time Crop Row Recognition Based on SoC-FPGA

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, agricultural robot plays a significantly important role for agricultural intelligence. Crop row line detection is a critical and fundamental step for agricultural robot navigation. Although there are some crop row lines detection methods, few of them can meet the real-time requirement for agricultural robot under complex fields conditions. In view of this, a real-time crop detection system implemented on a SoC FPGA (System-on-a-Chip Field Programmable Gate Array) is first proposed in this paper, which contains crop segmentation and crop row detection, where we design parallel pipeline architecture to enhance real-time performance by using line buffer and sliding windows technologies. At the same time, the fixed point representation is used to reduce the memory resource in this system. The proposed system is evaluated and implemented on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZCU102 SoC-FPGA. The experimental results show that the proposed system can process an image with 1920×1080 resolution only within 210 ms with the average accuracy of 89.7%, which satisfies the real-time requirements of the crop rows recognition.