Research on Monitoring and Coal Volume Estimation Methods for Belt Conveyors

This paper proposes a computer vision monitoring method based on coal mine belt conveyors. A camera is installed above the belt conveyor to collect the image data of the belt surface, and the computer vision method is used to achieve the detection of the operating status of the belt conveyor and the estimation of the volume of coal transported. First, a motion detection method based on background subtraction is used to detect the pixel changes on the belt surface to determine the operating status of the belt conveyor. Then YOLOv8n network is used to detect the material area on the belt conveyor. Finally, the instantaneous coal volume is estimated based on the width occupied by the boundary of the material region. It is proved through experiments that the method proposed in this paper can effectively monitor the operating status of the belt conveyor and the material conveying status.