A novel coal-rock recognition method in coal mining face based on fusing laser point cloud and images

Rapid and accurate recognition of coal and rock is an important prerequisite for safe and efficient coal mining. In this paper, a novel coal-rock recognition method is proposed based on fusing laser point cloud and images, named Multi-Modal Frustum PointNet (MMFP). Firstly, MobileNetV3 is used as the backbone network of Mask R-CNN to reduce the network parameters and compress the model volume. The dilated convolutional block attention mechanism (Dilated CBAM) and inception structure are combined with MobileNetV3 to further enhance the detection accuracy. Subsequently, the 2D target candidate box is calculated through the improved Mask R-CNN, and the frustum point cloud in the 2D target candidate box is extracted to reduce the calculation scale and spatial search range. Then, the self-attention PointNet is constructed to segment the fused point cloud within the frustum range, and the bounding box regression network is used to predict the bounding box parameters. Finally, an experimental platform of shearer coal wall cutting is established, and multiple comparative experiments are conducted. Experimental results indicate that the proposed coal-rock recognition method is superior to other advanced models.