Siami M, Barszcz T, Wodecki J, Zimroz R. Semantic segmentation of thermal defects in belt conveyor
idlers using thermal image augmentation and U-Net-based convolutional neural networks.
Sci Rep 2024;
14:5748. [PMID:
38459162 PMCID:
PMC10923815 DOI:
10.1038/s41598-024-55864-2]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/12/2023] [Accepted: 02/28/2024] [Indexed: 03/10/2024] Open
Abstract
The belt conveyor (BC) is the main means of horizontal transportation of bulk materials at mining sites. The sudden fault in BC modules may cause unexpected stops in production lines. With the increasing number of applications of inspection mobile robots in condition monitoring (CM) of industrial infrastructure in hazardous environments, in this article we introduce an image processing pipeline for automatic segmentation of thermal defects in thermal images captured from BC idlers using a mobile robot. This study follows the fact that CM of idler temperature is an important task for preventing sudden breakdowns in BC system networks. We compared the performance of three different types of U-Net-based convolutional neural network architectures for the identification of thermal anomalies using a small number of hand-labeled thermal images. Experiments on the test data set showed that the attention residual U-Net with binary cross entropy as the loss function handled the semantic segmentation problem better than our previous research and other studied U-Net variations.
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