Abstract: The jujube industry occupies an important position in the social economy of Xinjiang. It is important to realize the automatic driving of the jujube harvester. This study proposes a visual navigation path detection algorithm for the jujube harvester which working above the jujube trees based on image processing, aiming at the harvest operation of the Jun-jujube and Hui-jujube orchards in Xinjiang. First, the variety of the jujube orchard was distinguished. Set the middle 1/3 area in the y-axis direction of the image as the processing area, according to the relationship between the standard deviation d and the minimum value f of the B-component vertical cumulative histogram of the processing area of the image, the jujube orchard variety was automatically determined. If the value of f/d was less than 5, it was the Jun-jujube orchard, and the rest was the Hui-jujube orchard. Secondly, navigation path was extracted based on the results of jujube orchard classification. For the Hui-jujube orchard, the cromatic aberration method and the OTSU method weare first used to transform the image into gray and binary, and then to denoise and fill the pixel hole that the black pixels inside white pixels or the white pixels inside black pixels in the binary image. Then, the pixel rows were scanned from the top to the bottom in the processing area, and then the coordinates average value of the pixel points with pixel value of 0 were taken as the candidate points on each pixel row, and the average value of all candidate points' coordinates was used as the known point coordinates of Hough transform. Finally, the navigation path was fitted based on the Hough transform through the known points. For the Jun-jujube orchard, set the middle 1/3 of the X-axis direction of the image as the processing area. The scan interval was determined by vertically accumulating the R-component in the processing area. Then, in the processing area, the scanning interval was determined by accumulating R-component vertically, and then scanned line by line from top to bottom in the scanning area,,the pixel with the smallest R-component value in each row of pixels was taken as the candidate point of the line, and the average coordinate value of all candidate points was taken as the known point of Hough transform. Finally, the Hough transform of known points was used to fit the navigation path The test results showed that for the Hui-jujube orchard and the Jun-jujube orchard, the average path detection accuracy of the algorithm was 94% and 93%, and the average processing time of one frame image was 0.042 and 0.046 s respectively. The detection accuracy and real-time performance can meet the requirements of jujube harvester operation, and can automatically identify the types of jujube orchard for operation, which can provide theoretical basis for the realization of automatic driving of jujube harvester.