Patent Document ID: 8433483
Application ID: 13343340
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method of guiding a vehicle, the method comprising: identifying windrow pixels associated with a windrow within a collected color image; identifying a primary color of the windrow pixels and one or more secondary colors of background pixels; assigning a discrimination value to each pixel in the identified windrow pixels, wherein the discrimination value indicates whether the each pixel is crop image data or background image data, and wherein each pixel in the collected color image is associated with an intensity level; defining a search space with respect to a vehicle, the search space containing a series of scan line segments; determining respective spatial correlations between the defined search space and the windrow pixels for different angular displacements of the search space, wherein the determining respective spatial correlations comprises determining respective scan line intensities associated with the scan line segments for different angular displacements; determining a desired vehicular heading as a preferential angular displacement associated with a generally maximum spatial correlation between the defined search space and the windrow pixels; estimating a central point associated with the windrow based on pixel intensity of the windrow pixels; and estimating an offset of the vehicle to the central point of the windrow or a depth axis to achieve the desired vehicle heading and desired position of the vehicle with respect to the windrow.