Author(s)

Jennifer Mack¹, Anatina Trakowski¹, Florian Rist², Katja Herzog², Reinhard Töpfer², Volker Steinhage¹

¹Intelligent Vision Systems, Department of Computer Science IV, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
²Julius Kühn-Institut, Federal Research Centre of Cultivated Plants, Institute for Grapevine Breeding Geilweilerhof, Siebeldingen, Germany.

Object classification in high-density 3D point clouds with applications in precision farming is a very challenging area due to high intra-class variances and high degrees of occlusions and overlaps due to self-similarities and densely packed plant organs, especially in ripe growing stages. Due to these application specific challenges, this contribution gives an experimental evaluation of the performance of local shape descriptors (namely Point-Feature Histogram (PFH), Fast-Point-Feature Histogram (FPFH), Signature of Histograms of Orientations (SHOT), Rotational Projection Statistics (RoPS) and Spin Images) in the classification of 3D points into different types of plant organs. We achieve very good results on four representative scans of a leave, a grape bunch, a grape branch and a flower of between 94 and 99% accuracy in the case of supervised classification with an SVM and between 88 and 96% accuracy using a k-means clustering approach. Additionally, different distance measures and the influence of the number of cluster centres are examined.

Descriptor Performance, Precision Farming, 3D Data

Mack, J. , Trakowski, A. , Rist, F. , Herzog, K. , Töpfer, R. and Steinhage, V. (2017) Experimental Evaluation of the Performance of Local Shape Descriptors for the Classification of 3D Data in Precision Farming. Journal of Computer and Communications, 5, 1-12. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2017.512001.