LAUSR

In order to realize the visual positioning for Hangzhou white chrysanthemums harvesting robot in natural environment, a color image segmentation method for Hangzhou white chrysanthemum based on least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) was proposed. Firstly, bilateral filter was used to filter the RGB channels image respectively to eliminate noise. Then the pixel-level color feature and texture feature of the image, which was used as input of LS-SVM model (classifier) and SVM model (classifier), were extracted via RGB value of image and gray level co-occurrence matrix. Finally, the color image was segmented with the trained LS-SVM model (classifier) and SVM model (classifier) separately. The experimental results showed that the trained LS-SVM model and SVM model could effectively segment the images of the Hangzhou white chrysanthemums from complicated background taken under three illumination conditions such as front-lighting, back-lighting and overshadow, with the accuracy of above 90%. When segmenting an image, the SVM algorithm required 1.3 s, while the LS-SVM algorithm proposed in this paper just needed 0.7 s, which was better than the SVM algorithm obviously. The picking experiment was carried out and the results showed that the implementation of the proposed segmentation algorithm on the picking robot could achieve 81% picking success rate. Keywords: bilateral filter, least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), image segmentation, Hangzhou white chrysanthemum, illumination intensity DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20191204.4584 Citation: Yang Q H, Luo S L, Chang C, Xun Y, Bao G J. Segmentation algorithm for Hangzhou white chrysanthemums based on least squares support vector machine. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2019; 12(4): 127–134.