Enhancement of Vision-Based 3D Reconstruction Systems Using Radar for Smart Farming

Abstract

Digital field recordings are central to most precision agriculture systems since they can replicate the physical environment and thus monitor the state of an entire field or individual plants. Using different sensors, such as cameras and radar, data can be collected from various domains. Through the combination of radio wave propagation and visible light phenomena, it is possible to enhance, e.g., the optical condition of a fruit with internal parameters such as the water content. This paper proposes a method to correct sensor errors to perform data fusion. As an example, we observe a watermelon with camera and radar sensors and present a system architecture for the visualization of both sensors. For this purpose, we constructed a handheld platform on which both sensors are mounted. In our report, the radar is analyzed in terms of systematic and stochastic errors to formulate an angle-dependent mapping function for error correction. It is successfully shown that camera and radar data are correctly assigned with a watermelon used as a target object, demonstrated by a 3D reconstruction. The proposed system shows promising results for sensor overlay, but radar data remain challenging to interpret.