Mineral Identification Based on Multi-Label Image Classification

The identification of minerals is indispensable in geological analysis. Traditional mineral identification methods are highly dependent on professional knowledge and specialized equipment which often consume a lot of labor. To solve this problem, some researchers use machine learning algorithms to quickly identify a single mineral in images. However, in the natural environment, minerals often exist in an associated form, which makes the identification impossible with traditional machine learning algorithms. For the identification of associated minerals, this paper proposes a deep learning model based on the transformer and multi-label image classification. The model uses transformer architecture to model mineral images and outputs the probability of the existence of various minerals in an image. The experiments on 36 common minerals show that the model can achieve a mean average precision of 85.26%. The visualization of the class activation mapping indicates that our model can roughly locate the identified minerals.