Image Process of Rock Size Distribution Using DexiNed-Based Neural Network

In an aggregate crushing plant, the crusher performances will be affected by the variation from the incoming feed size distribution. Collecting accurate measurements of the size distribution on the conveyors can help both operators and control systems to make the right decisions in order to reduce overall power consumption and avoid undesirable operating conditions. In this work, a particle size distribution estimation method based on a DexiNed edge detection network, followed by the application of contour optimization, is proposed. The proposed framework was carried out in the four main steps. The first step, after image preprocessing, was to utilize a modified DexiNed convolutional neural network to predict the edge map of the rock image. Next, morphological transformation and watershed transformation from the OpenCV library were applied. Then, in the last step, the mass distribution was estimated from the pixel contour area. The accuracy and efficiency of the DexiNed method were demonstrated by comparing it with the ground-truth segmentation. The PSD estimation was validated with the laboratory screened rock sample

Faster OreFSDet : A Lightweight and Effective Few-shot Object Detector for Ore Images

For the ore particle size detection, obtaining a sizable amount of high-quality ore labeled data is time-consuming and expensive. General object detection methods often suffer from severe over-fitting with scarce labeled data. Despite their ability to eliminate over-fitting, existing few-shot object detectors encounter drawbacks such as slow detection speed and high memory requirements, making them difficult to implement in a real-world deployment scenario. To this end, we propose a lightweight and effective few-shot detector to achieve competitive performance with general object detection with only a few samples for ore images. First, the proposed support feature mining block characterizes the importance of location information in support features. Next, the relationship guidance block makes full use of support features to guide the generation of accurate candidate proposals. Finally, the dual-scale semantic aggregation module retrieves detailed features at different resolutions to contribute with the prediction process. Experimental results show that our method consistently exceeds the few-shot detectors with an excellent performance gap on all metrics. Moreover, our method achieves the smallest model size of 19MB as well as being competitive at 50 FPS detection speed compared with general object detectors. The source code is available at https://github.com/MVME-HBUT/Faster-OreFSDet.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure

A new weakly supervised learning approach for real-time iron ore feed load estimation

Iron ore feed-load control is one of the most critical settings in a mineral grinding process. It has direct impact on the quality of final iron products. The setting of the feed load heavily replies the characteristics of the ore pellets. However, such characteristics are challenging to acquire in many production environments, requiring speical equipments and complicated modelling process with a high cost. To provide an low-cost and easier-to-implement solution, in this paper, we present our work on using deep learning models for direct ore feed load estimation from ore pellet images. To address the challenges caused by the large size of ore images and the shortage of accurately annotated data, we proposed to use a weakly supervised learning apporach with a two-stage model training algorithm and two neural network architectures developed. The experiment results show competitive model performance, and the trained models can be used for real-time feed load estimation for grind process optimisation

A new weakly supervised learning approach for real-time iron ore feed load estimation

Iron ore feed-load control is one of the most critical settings in a mineral grinding process. It has direct impact on the quality of final iron products. The setting of the feed load heavily replies the characteristics of the ore pellets. However, such characteristics are challenging to acquire in many production environments, requiring speical equipments and complicated modelling process with a high cost. To provide an low-cost and easier-to-implement solution, in this paper, we present our work on using deep learning models for direct ore feed load estimation from ore pellet images. To address the challenges caused by the large size of ore images and the shortage of accurately annotated data, we proposed to use a weakly supervised learning apporach with a two-stage model training algorithm and two neural network architectures developed. The experiment results show competitive model performance, and the trained models can be used for real-time feed load estimation for grind process optimisation