Multi-Crop Navigation Line Extraction Based on Improved YOLO-v8 and Threshold-DBSCAN under Complex Agricultural Environments

Field crops are usually planted in rows, and accurate identification and extraction of crop row centerline is the key to realize autonomous navigation and safe operation of agricultural machinery. However, the diversity of crop species and morphology, as well as field noise such as weeds and light, often lead to poor crop detection in complex farming environments. In addition, the curvature of crop rows also poses a challenge to the safety of farm machinery during travel. In this study, a combined multi-crop row centerline extraction algorithm is proposed based on improved YOLOv8 (You Only Look Once-v8) model, threshold DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) clustering, least squares method, and B-spline curves. For the detection of multiple crops, a DCGA-YOLOv8 model is developed by introducing deformable convolution and global attention mechanism (GAM) on the original YOLOv8 model. The introduction of deformable convolution can obtain more fine-grained spatial information and adapt to crops of different sizes and shapes, while the combination of GAM can pay more attention to the important feature areas of crops. The experimental results shown that the F1-score and mAP value of the DCGA-YOLOv8 model for Cabbage, Kohlrabi, and Rice are 96.4%, 97.1%, 95.9% and 98.9%, 99.2%, 99.1%, respectively, which has good generalization and robustness. A threshold-DBSCAN algorithm was proposed to implement clustering for each row of crops. The correct clustering rate for Cabbage, Kohlrabi and Rice reaches 98.9%, 97.9%, and 100%, respectively. And LSM and cubic B-spline curve methods were applied to fit straight and curved crop rows, respectively. In addition, this study constructed a risk optimization function for the wheel model to further improve the safety of agricultural machines operating between crop rows. This indicates that the proposed method can effectively realize the accurate recognition and extraction of navigation lines of different crops in complex farmland environment, and improve the safety and stability of visual navigation and field operation of agricultural machines.