Application of the Kinect sensor for dynamic soil surface characterization

Agricultural soil roughness is pertinent to important agricultural phenomena, such as evaporation, infiltration or compression. Monitoring roughness variations would make possible the improvement of tillage operations. In the present work, implementation of the Microsoft Kinect™ RGB-depth camera for dynamic characterization of soil micro-relief is proposed and discussed. The metrological performance and the effect of the operating conditions on three-dimensional reconstruction was analyzed considering both laboratory tests on calibrated reference surfaces and field tests on different agricultural soil surfaces. Data set analysis was made on the basis of surface roughness parameters, as defined by ISO 25178 (2012) series: average roughness, root mean square roughness, skewness and kurtosis. Correlation between different tillage conditions and roughness parameters describing soil morphology was finally discussed.