Deep learning based data augmentation for large-scale mineral image recognition and classification

Vision-based mineral image recognition and classification is a proven solution for autonomous unmanned ore sorting. Although accurate identification can be achieved by training models offline using large-scale datasets, the lack of sufficient labeled images still limits the accessibility and exploration of high-performance deep learning models. To address the above issues, referring to the generative adversarial networks, three different deep learning-based mineral image data augmentation models are proposed in this work. The experimental results show that the proposed models can generate mineral images with high fidelity and have high similarity to the ground truth in terms of texture, color and shape. Compared with classic data augmentation methods, proposed ones can better optimize downstream sorting tasks: the accuracy of ResNet101, ResNet50, InceptionV3 and VGG19 is improved by 18.52%, 9.94%, 4.39% and 2.39%, respectively. Finally, this work also presents a monolithic three-stage system workflow for large-scale mineral image recognition and classification.