A Lithology Recognition Network Based on Attention and Feature Brownian Distance Covariance

In the context of mountain tunnel mining through the drilling and blasting method, the recognition of lithology from palm face images is crucial for the comprehensive analysis of geological conditions and the prevention of geological risks. However, the complexity of the background in the acquired palm face images, coupled with an insufficient data sample size, poses challenges. While the incorporation of deep learning technology has enhanced lithology recognition accuracy, issues persist, including inadequate feature extraction and suboptimal recognition accuracy. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a lithology recognition network integrating attention mechanisms and a feature Brownian distance covariance approach. Drawing inspiration from the Brownian distance covariance concept, a feature Brownian distance covariance module is devised to enhance the network’s attention to rock sample features and improve classification accuracy. Furthermore, an enhanced lightweight Convolutional Block Attention Module is introduced, with upgrades to the multilayer perceptron in the channel attention module. These improvements emphasize attention to lithological features while mitigating interference from background information. The proposed method is evaluated on a palm face image dataset collected in the field. The proposed method was evaluated on a dataset comprising field-collected images of a tunnel rock face. The results illustrate a significant enhancement in the improved model’s ability to recognize rock images, as evidenced by improvements across all objective evaluation metrics. The achieved accuracy rate of 97.60% surpasses that of the current mainstream lithology recognition neural network.