Measuring blast fragmentation at Nui Phao open-pit mine, Vietnam using the Mask R-CNN deep learning model

Blast fragmentation size distribution is one of the most critical factors in evaluating the blasting results and affecting the downstream mining and processing operations in open-pit mines. Image-based methods are widely applied to address the problem but require heavy user interaction and experience. This study deployed a deep learning model Mask R-CNN to develop an automatic measurement method of blast fragmentation. The model was trained using images captured from real blasting sites in Nui Phao open-pit mine in Vietnam. The trained model reported high average precision scores (Intersection over Union, IoU = 0.5) 92% and 83% for bounding box and segmentation masks, respectively. The results lay a solid technical basis for the automated measurement of blast fragmentation in open-pit mines.