Coal quality prediction based on multi-feature fusion of flotation foam images

Abstract Coal flotation monitoring cannot provide real-time feedback on the yield and ash of coal preparation products because it is influenced by the subjective nature of artificial judgment of coal preparation status and the lag of product quality testing of coal preparation. This paper aims to extract the texture, colour and shape features of floating foam images using various image processing methods, such as colour space, wavelet transform, greyscale co-occurrence matrix and edge operator, and to quantify the characterisation of various characteristic parameters on the basis of the indicative effect of floating foam characteristics on the quality of coal preparation products. The correlation between image features and the yield and ash of flotation products is studied, and a regression prediction model of coal preparation yield and ash was established by combining various image feature parameters using machine learning methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method can realise the real-time monitoring of coal mine flotation and effectively predict coal quality.