A segmentation approach in novel real time 3D plant recognition system

One of the most invasive and persistent kind of weed in agriculture is also called "Broad-leaved Dock". The origin of the plant is Europe and northern Asia, but it has also been reported that this plant occurs in wide parts of Northern America. Eradication of this plant is labour-intensive and hence there is an interest in automatic weed control devices. Some vision systems were proposed that allow to localize and map plants in the meadow. However, these systems were designed and implemented for o-line processing. This paper presents a segmentation approach that allows for real-time recognition and application of herbicides onto the plant leaves. Instead of processing the gray-scale or colour images, our approach relays on 3D point cloud analysis and processing. 3D data processing has several advantages over 2D image processing approaches when it comes to extraction and recognition of plants in their natural environment