An Improved Encoder–Decoder Network for Ore Image Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of ore images plays a significant role in automatic geometric parameter detecting and composition analyzing of ore dressing progress. Semantic segmentation based on deep learning is a promising method for accurate ore image segmentation. However, the similar appearance with low contrast and blurry boundary of ores in image hamper segmentation accuracy. Moreover, it is difficult to train a deep network due to limited available ore images. In this work, an improved encoder-decoder network based on U-Net is proposed to handle above challenges. A contour awareness loss (CAL) is proposed to improve model sensitivity to misclassified pixels, pixels of similar appearance, and pixels near the boundary. The proposed scheme is verified on ore images by benchmarking against state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme achieves 88.6% pixel-wise accuracy (PA) and 66.0% mean intersection over union (mIoU).