Coal and Gangue Recognition Method Based on Local Texture Classification Network for Robot Picking

Abstract

Coal gangue is a kind of industrial waste in the coal mine preparation process. Compared to conventional manual or machine-based separation technology, vision-based methods and robotic grasping are superior in cost and maintenance. However, the existing methods may have a poor recognition accuracy problem in diverse environments since coals and gangues’ apparent features can be unreliable. This paper analyzes the current methods and proposes a vision-based coal and gangue recognition model LTC-Net for separation systems. The preprocessed full-scale images are divided into n × n local texture images since coals and gangues differ more on a smaller scale, enabling the model to overcome the influence of characteristics that tend to change with the environment. A VGG16-based model is trained to classify the local texture images through a voting classifier. Prediction is given by a threshold. Experiments based on multi-environment datasets show higher accuracy and stability of our method compared to existing methods. The effect of n and t is also discussed.