High-speed motion estimation of fertilizer granules with Gabor filters

2008

In the context of fertilizer supply reduction, the understanding of the whole centrifugal spreading process became essential. Since few years we focused our research on the determination by image processing of the ejection conditions of flight of the granules, that is the trajectories and ejection angles, used as input data for ballistic flight to predict the fertilizer repartition on the ground. Due to relative high speed of the fertilizer granules (around 40 m.s -1 ), the previous parameters were evaluated using a specific high speed imaging system and image processing based on motion estimation method using Markov Random Fields method (MRFs). Even if the results were good (90% of correct…