Estimation of copper grade from the flotation froth using image analysis and machine vision

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 bResearch Department of Mining and hydrometallurgy, Mineral Processing Research Institute, Academic Center for Education, Culture & Research, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran

2 Assistant Professor, Institute of Mineral Processing, ACECR at Tarbiat Modares

Abstract

By observing froth surface, operators can usually determine the metallurgical parameters (grade and recovery) of the flotation process, but it is associated with many problems such as the inability to continuously monitor significant differences with operation results, and various observations by different persons. In this study, the physical and structural properties of flotation froth images have been investigated to determine the metallurgical parameters of copper oxide ore. Pre-processing and processing of images obtained from the flotation froth were studied using artificial neural networks in the MATLAB program. The estimated grade was compared with the actual grade to check the accuracy of the system. Studies show that when the three color characteristics (red, green, and blue colors) of images are used to determine the grade of froth, these three characteristics alone are not sufficient to estimate the grade, and the amount of error rate is 21.7%. When factors of the three color characteristics and their standard deviation were studied for estimating the grade, the error rate reached 8.7%. Finally, the simultaneous studies of 11 characteristics including color channels, their standard deviation and haralic characteristics (entropy, contrast, energy, correlation, and gradient-density) showed a very good similarity between the actual grade and their predicted grade. The calculated error rate was greatly reduced to 2.3%. The method of work was including of the picture taking of froth flotation, pre-processing and processing of images, characteristics extraction, system training, testing and validation, and finally, the results showed that the amount of froth grade in the online form.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Amirkabir Journal of Civil Engineering
Volume 54, Issue 3
June 2022
Pages 869-884

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