System for vehicular guidance with respect to harvested crop

A system of guiding a vehicle, the system comprising:

• a discriminator for 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, and 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;
• a definer for defining a search space with respect to a vehicle, the search space containing a series of scan line segments, wherein the series of scan line segments has scan line intensities based on the intensity level in the each pixel in the collected color image;
• an evaluator for determining respective spatial correlations between the defined search space and the windrow pixels for different angular displacements of the search space, wherein the respective spatial correlations are based on scan line intensities associated with the scan line segments for different angular displacements;
• an alignment detector for determining a desired vehicle heading as a preferential angular heading associated with a generally maximum spatial correlation between the defined search space and the windrow pixels;
• and
• an offset calculator for identifying a desired offset of the vehicle that is generally aligned with respect to the windrow, associated with the collected color image, consistent with the desired vehicle heading.