Coal gangue recognition using multichannel auditory spectrogram of hydraulic support sound in convolutional neural network

Abstract Many data-driven coal gangue recognition (CGR) methods based on the vibration or sound of collapsed coal and gangue have been proposed to achieve automatic CGR, which is important for realizing intelligent top-coal caving. However, the strong background noise and complex environment in underground coal mines render this task challenging in practical applications. Inspired by the fact that workers distinguish coal and gangue from underground noise by listening to the hydraulic support sound, we propose an auditory model based CGR method that simulates human auditory recognition by combining an auditory spectrogram with a convolutional neural network (CNN). First, we adjust the characteristic frequency (CF) distribution of the auditory peripheral model (APM) based on the spectral characteristics of collapsed sound signals from coal and gangue and then process the sound signals using the adjusted APM to obtain inferior colliculus auditory signals with multiple CFs. Subsequently, the auditory signals of all CFs are converted into gray images separately and then concatenated into a multichannel auditory spectrum (MCAS) along the channel dimension. Finally, we input the MCAS as a feature map to the two-dimensional CNN, whose convolutional layers are used to automatically extract features, and the fully connected layer and softmax layer are used to flatten features and predict the recognition result, respectively. The CNN is optimized for the CGR based on a comparison study of four typical types of CNN structures with different network training hyperparameters. The experimental results show that this method affords an accurate CGR with a recognition accuracy of 99.5%. Moreover, this method offers excellent noise immunity compared with typically used CGR methods under various noisy conditions.