6533b852fe1ef96bd12ab5a4

RESEARCH PRODUCT

High-speed motion estimation of fertilizer granules with Gabor filters

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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 trajectories), this method needs an invariance of luminance between two successive images and a good initialization of the motion, quite difficult to reach with the previous imaging device. In this paper we describe some improvements of the image acquisition system (illumination management) and we tested image processings using Gabor filters and Block Matching technique. The results obtained on synthesis images are satisfying but the specific fertilizer motion and behaviour needs other improvements of these two previous methods to give accurate results in terms of speed and direction of the granules. A comparison with the MRFs method is also currently investigating to propose a final reliable image processing technique to be adapted for 3D estimation.