ORIGINAL PAPER
RA-UNet++ based image segmentation of adherent ores
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School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, jiangxi University of Science and Technology Ganzhou, jiangxi Province, China
 
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Jiangxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Particle Technology, Nanchang , Jiangxi 330013, China
 
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School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, jiangxi University of Science and TechnologyGanzhou, jiangxi Province, China
 
 
Submission date: 2025-06-16
 
 
Final revision date: 2025-07-03
 
 
Acceptance date: 2025-09-05
 
 
Publication date: 2026-04-15
 
 
Corresponding author
Xiaoyan Luo   

School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, jiangxi University of Science and Technology Ganzhou, jiangxi Province, China
 
 
Gospodarka Surowcami Mineralnymi – Mineral Resources Management 2026;42(2):69-87
 
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Ore particle size information is an important indicator for evaluating the operating status and production efficiency of crushers. However, in the actual industrial environment, adhesion phenomena often occur during the acquisition and transportation of ores, resulting in overlapping edges and blurred contours of ores in the images. Traditional image segmentation methods are difficult to achieve high-precision recognition and segmentation. To this end, this paper proposes an RA-UNet++ adhered ore image segmentation method based on the improved UNet++ structure to improve the segmentation performance in complex scenes. Based on the UNet++ coender-decoding architecture, the residual module and the self-attention mechanism are integrated to enhance the model’s ability to extract and express the edge details of ores. Meanwhile, multi-scale atrous convolution is introduced at the end of the encoder to construct the Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) structure, expand the receptive field, enhance the multi-scale perception ability for ores of different particle sizes, and thereby improve the overall segmentation effect. The experimental results show that RA-UNet++ performs excellently in the task of image segmentation of adhered ores, significantly improving the clarity and integrity of edge segmentation. Compared with the Otsu method and the standard UNet model, this method has advantages in terms of robustness, boundary preservation, and segmentation accuracy. The pixel-level and target-level segmentation accuracy rates of adhered ore images both exceed 93%, showing good potential for industrial applications.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The Authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
METADATA IN OTHER LANGUAGES:
Polish
Segmentacja obrazów rud przylegających z wykorzystaniem sieci RA-UNet++
segmentacja obrazu, UNet++, moduł resztkowy, mechanizm samo-uwagi, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling
Informacje dotyczące wielkości cząstek rudy stanowią ważny wskaźnik służący do oceny stanu pracy i wydajności produkcyjnej kruszarek. Jednak w rzeczywistych warunkach przemysłowych podczas pozyskiwania i transportu rud często dochodzi do zjawisk zlepiania się cząstek, co powoduje nakładanie się krawędzi i rozmycie konturów rudy na obrazach. Tradycyjne metody segmentacji obrazów mają trudności z osiągnięciem wysokiej precyzji rozpoznawania i segmentacji. W związku z tym w niniejszym artykule proponuje się metodę segmentacji obrazów rudy ze zjawiskiem przywierania RA-UNet++, opartą na ulepszonej strukturze UNet++, mającą na celu poprawę wydajności segmentacji w złożonych scenach. W oparciu o architekturę kodowania i dekodowania UNet++ zintegrowano moduł resztkowy oraz mechanizm samo-uwagi, aby wzmocnić zdolność modelu do wyodrębniania i wyrażania szczegółów krawędzi rudy. Jednocześnie na końcu kodera wprowadzono wieloskalową konwolucję atrous, aby zbudować strukturę Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), rozszerzyć pole receptywne, zwiększyć zdolność postrzegania w wielu skalach dla rud o różnych rozmiarach cząstek, a tym samym poprawić ogólny efekt segmentacji. Wyniki eksperymentalne pokazują, że RA-UNet++ doskonale radzi sobie z zadaniem segmentacji obrazów rud przylegających, znacznie poprawiając klarowność i integralność segmentacji krawędzi. W porównaniu z metodą Otsu i standardowym modelem UNet metoda ta ma przewagę pod względem odporności, zachowania granic i dokładności segmentacji. Wskaźniki dokładności segmentacji obrazów rudy przylegającej, zarówno na poziomie pikseli, jak i na poziomie obiektów docelowych, przekraczają 93%, co wskazuje na duży potencjał w zastosowaniach przemysłowych.
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