FAOF: a feature aggregation method based on optical flow for gangue detection on production environment

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to improve the precision of gangue detection. In the real production environment, some gangue features are not obvious, and it is difficult to distinguish between coal and gangue. The color of the conveyor belt is similar to the gangue, the background noise also brings challenge to gangue detection. To address the above problems, we propose a feature aggregation method based on optical flow (FAOF). Design/methodology/approach An FAOF is proposed. First, to enhance the feature representation of the current frame, FAOF applies the timing information of video stream, propagates the feature information of the past few frames to the current frame by optical flow. Second, the coordinate attention (CA) module is adopted to suppress the noise impact brought by the background of convey belt. Third, the Mish activation function is used to replace rectified linear unit to improve the generalization capability of our model. Findings The experimental results show that the gangue detection model proposed in this paper improve 4.3 average precision compared to baseline. This model can effectively improve the accuracy of gangue detection in real production environment. Originality/value The key contributions are as follows: this study proposes an FAOF; this study adds CA module and Mish to reduce noise from the background of the conveyor belt; and this study also constructs a large gangue data set.