First Step Towards Embedded Vision System for Pruning Wood Estimation

This paper focuses on the development and evaluation of a portable vision-based acquisition device for vineyards, equipped with a GPU-accelerated processing unit. The device is designed to perform in-field image acquisitions with high-resolution and dense information. It includes three vision systems: the Intel® RealSense™ depth camera D435i, the Intel® RealSense™ tracking camera T265, and a Basler RGB DART camera. The device is powered by an Nvidia Jetson Nano processing board for both simultaneous data acquisition and real-time processing. The paper presents two specific tasks for which the acquisition device can be useful: wood volume estimation and early bud counting. Acquisition campaigns were conducted in a commercial vineyard in Italy, capturing images of vine shoots and buds using the prototype device. The wood volume estimation software is based on image processing techniques, achieving an RMSE of 2.1 cm3 and a mean deviation of 1.8 cm3. The buds detection task is obtained by fine-tuning the YOLOv8 model on a purposely acquired custom dataset, achieving a promising F1-Score of 0.79.