Machine Vision for On-Line Weed Identification

To compensate the existing difficulties in case of machine vision based weed recognition more and more complicated systems are applied. It means a demand of significantly increasing investment and extra cost for the farmers. However, the complexity of the field conditions and the morphological variability of the plants still make weed identification complicated. The typical barrier of the practical application is the insufficient efficiency caused by the limited viewing angle of the optical devices and the long computation time. The authors review their optical sensor based weed monitoring system operating with CCD and infrared camera, and a special solution – a special optical device with an optical angle of 360° - trying to eliminate the limitation of the optical instruments concerning to their view angle.