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Development of a novel mechatronic system for mechanical weed ...

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State <strong>of</strong> the art<br />

detection <strong>of</strong> certain geometric differences between the crop and <strong>weed</strong> species,<br />

or differences in spectral reflectance.<br />

It has been confirmed that discrimination between monocots and dicots is<br />

possible using shape feature analysis (Woebbecke et al. 1995). However it has<br />

been stated that <strong>weed</strong> detection based on texture (leaf shape) analysis could<br />

become fairly complicated, because <strong>of</strong> a wide spectrum <strong>of</strong> different leaf shapes<br />

<strong>of</strong> various species (Guyer et al. 1986). Particular problems are the unfavourable<br />

conditions which can occur on the field:<br />

� overlapping <strong>of</strong> the leaves;<br />

� leaf orientation in relation to the plane in which the trans<strong>for</strong>mation <strong>of</strong><br />

the 3 dimensional space to 2 dimensional image has been done;<br />

� variation <strong>of</strong> the distance between the camera and the target plant,<br />

causing changes in field <strong>of</strong> view and focusing and<br />

� trans<strong>for</strong>mation <strong>of</strong> the leaf boundaries in images in reference to the<br />

model due to their movement in the wind.<br />

On the other hand, colour characteristics <strong>of</strong> plants <strong>of</strong>ten provide sufficient<br />

in<strong>for</strong>mation <strong>for</strong> distinction between different species, impose fewer restrictions<br />

on leaf overlap, leaf orientation, camera position and camera focusing. A study<br />

<strong>of</strong> <strong>weed</strong> detection based on the differences in the stem colour, detecting<br />

species with stems colours ranging from reddish to purplish (El-Faki et al. 2000)<br />

has proved the potentials <strong>of</strong> the colour approach. Low processing speed,<br />

hardware requirements and dependence on variable conditions in the field can<br />

be generally designated as bottlenecks <strong>of</strong> machine vision <strong>system</strong>s.<br />

Several groups have measured the spectral reflectance <strong>of</strong> crops and <strong>weed</strong><br />

species to evaluate the possibility <strong>of</strong> crop/<strong>weed</strong> discrimination based on<br />

different spectral reflectance (Franz et al. 1995; Zwiggelaar 1998). The<br />

advantage <strong>of</strong> using spectral reflectance <strong>for</strong> plant/<strong>weed</strong> detection is the fast data<br />

processing. However, differences in spectral characteristics are not always<br />

large and robust enough <strong>for</strong> unique decision (Clausen et al. 2000). A review <strong>of</strong><br />

the use <strong>of</strong> spectral properties <strong>for</strong> <strong>weed</strong> detection and identification has been<br />

written by Noble (Noble and Crowe 2002).<br />

27

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