Visually guided operations in green-houses

A vision system to operate in a greenhouse environment designed for tomato cultivation is presented. The signals sent by two PAL colour cameras are processed by a graphic workstation using a bit-slice microprocessor card for fast image processing. Cultural operations are examined and the proper vision system specifications are defined. Attention is turned on two aspects: localization of main objects (e.g. flowers, fruits) and navigation. As for localization, an algorithm has been developed based on the colour and particularly on the hue component (extracted 3 times per second from a RGB input) for segmentation and on a stereo processing to find the distance of segmented objects. Results are good enough to demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach