Automated Identification of Mineral Types and Grain Size Using Hyperspectral Imaging and Deep Learning for Mineral Processing

In mining operations, an ore is separated into its constituents through mineral processing methods, such as flotation. Identifying the type of minerals contained in the ore in advance aids greatly in performing faster and more efficient mineral processing. The human eye can recognize visual information in three wavelength regions: red, green, and blue. With hyperspectral imaging, high resolution spectral data that contains information from the visible light wavelength region to the near infrared region can be obtained. Using deep learning, the features of the hyperspectral data can be extracted and learned, and the spectral pattern that is unique to each mineral can be identified and analyzed. In this paper, we propose an automatic mineral identification system that can identify mineral types before the mineral processing stage by combining hyperspectral imaging and deep learning. By using this technique, it is possible to quickly identify the types of minerals contained in rocks using a non-destructive method. As a result of experimentation, the identification accuracy of the minerals that underwent deep learning on the red, green, and blue (RGB) image of the mineral was approximately 30%, while the result of the hyperspectral data analysis using deep learning identified the mineral species with a high accuracy of over 90%.