Photogammetry enabled Automatic Mining Exploration

Mining is a cornerstone of the Australian economy, and the whole world needs cheap and reliable minerals obtained from mining. We want to help mining companies be competitive, by analysing the image data of their mines in real time. Instead of taking days for geologists to work through the image data manually, make inferences on the ore characteristics, and finally direct the underground mining machines, mining companies can use our technology to help automate this process. This will avoid having mining equipment operating suboptimally by digging in the wrong directions, and enable mining managers to plan ahead as the feedback loop between mining conditions and business decisions gets tighter.

We developed an algorithm for real time quality classification of ore given photos of tunnel wall faces. It uses image processing techniques such as de-noising, segmentation, clustering, and machine learning. Fundamentally, our algorithm can present insights which were trained from the knowledge of the geologist and from historical data. According to Glass Terra, our algorithm was predicting 70 - 80% of the images correctly, while human geologists was about 75% correct on the test image data. Even though our algorithm isn’t as accurate as ground truth results obtained by the lab, our results can be acquired instantly. This algorithm is just the beginning, with more data, we can uncover greater insights about the characteristics of the ore, and provide predictive and prescriptive analytics to mining operators and geologists.

Our algorithm when successfully implemented would provide economical advantages in faster decision time in terms of direction of digging, method of processing the ore and other optimisations. With this potential, we are expanding our sales and marketing channels through direct sales and engaging partners and their client network, including Northparkes, Newcrest and Glass Terra.

Roger Qiu

Software Developer focused on Infrastructural Automation. Working on distributed systems and making them highly available and highly scalable. Also automating DevOps. Cofounder of Matrix AI (https://matrix.ai), and cofounder of Illuminate Imaging (https://illuminate.io/). The presentation is about Illuminate Imaging.