Spatio-temporal analysis for obstacle detection in agricultural videos

Autonomous mobile vehicles are becoming commoner in outdoor scenarios for agricultural applications. They must be equipped with a robot navigation system for sensing, mapping, localization, path planning, and obstacle avoidance. In autonomous vehicles, safety becomes a major challenge where unexpected obstacles in the working area must be conveniently addressed. Of particular interest are, people or animals crossing in front of the vehicle or fixed/moving uncatalogued elements in specific positions. Detection of unexpected obstacles or elements on video sequences acquired with a machine vision system on-board a tractor moving in cornfields makes the main contribution to this research. We propose a new strategy for automatic video analysis to detect static/dynamic obstacles in agricultural environments via spatial-temporal analysis. At a first stage obstacles are detected by using spatial information based on spectral colour analysis and texture data. At a second stage temporal information is used to detect moving objects/obstacles at the scene, which is of particular interest in camouflaged elements within the environment. A main feature of our method is that it does not require any training process. Another feature of our approach consists in the spatial analysis to obtain an initial segmentation of interesting objects; afterwards, temporal information is used for discriminating between moving and static objects. To the best of our knowledge in the field of agricultural image analysis, classical approaches make use of either spatial or temporal information, but not both at the same time, making an important contribution. Our method shows favourable results when tested in different outdoor scenarios in agricultural environments, which are really complex, mainly due to the high variability in the illumination conditions, causing undesired effects such as shadows and alternating lighted and dark areas. Dynamic background, camera vibrations and static and dynamic objects are also factors complicating the situation. The results are comparable to those obtained with other state-of-art techniques reported in literature.