Estimation of particulate fines on conveyor belts by use of wavelets and morphological image processing

Abstract

Estimation of the amount of fines in images of mineral particles using standard segmentation approaches is difficult. In this paper, an approach based on multivariate image analysis is presented for estimation of the amount of fines in particles on conveyor belts. The approach is based on two-level wavelet decomposition and morphological image operations, followed by feature extraction from gray level co-occurrence matrices. These features could be used with a simple k nearest neighbour model to estimate the proportion of fines in particulate images. Experimental results with coal and iron ore particles show that the performance of the method can yield better results than those achievable with standard methods.