Learning-Based Key Points Estimation Method for Burden Surface Profile Detection in Blast Furnace

Accurate Burden Surface Profile (BSP) detection is important for the operation of Blast Furnace (BF). The signal-to-noise ratio of radar signals changes greatly during both the charging period of BF and the long maintenance period of the radar device, which increases the difficulty of radar BSP detection. The traditional radar BSP detection method based on signal energy relies on manually selected detection thresholds according to the noise intensity. Hence, the accuracy of the traditional radar BSP detection method is not reliable in the long term. To address this problem, we propose a novel learning-based Key Points estimation (KP-BSP) method to detect the key points of radar reconstructed BSP image, and a new Key Points-based Connected Region Noise Reduction (KP-CRNR) algorithm to remove the noise-affected regions. The prediction deviation at detected key points (at the positions of the mechanical probes) is then used to correct the radar detection results, leading to the improvement of radar detection accuracy. The experimental data were collected from Wuhan Iron Steel Company No.7 BF. The results show that the proposed methods can achieve an average RMSE of 0.0156m, which is improved by more than 50% compared with previous methods. The long-term reliability of the proposed method is also demonstrated in this dataset.