Online Identification of Shearer Cutting State Using Infrared Thermal Images of Cutting Unit

In order to achieve accurate identification of a shearer cutting state, infrared thermal images were creatively adopted in this paper. As the position of a shearer cutting unit is constantly changing, and the temperature in the vicinity is obviously distinct, mathematical morphology theory was used to detect the cutting unit in an infrared thermal image. Furthermore, a target tracking method is put forward to achieve cutting unit tracking based on the combination of morphology and a spatio-temporal context (STC) algorithm. Then, the temperature field features of this tracking area were extracted, and an intelligent classifier based on a support vector machine (SVM) was constructed to identify the cutting state of the shearer. Some experiments are presented, and the results indicate the feasibility and superiority of the proposed method.