Richard J. Murphy

Lloyd Windrim, Arman Melkumyan, Richard J. Murphy et al.

The remote mapping of minerals and discrimination of ore and waste on surfaces are important tasks for geological applications such as those in mining. Such tasks have become possible using ground-based, close-range hyperspectral sensors which can remotely measure the reflectance properties of the environment with high spatial and spectral resolution. However, autonomous mapping of mineral spectra measured on an open-cut mine face remains a challenging problem due to the subtleness of differences in spectral absorption features between mineral and rock classes as well as variability in the illumination of the scene. An additional layer of difficulty arises when there is no annotated data available to train a supervised learning algorithm. A pipeline for unsupervised mapping of spectra on a mine face is proposed which draws from several recent advances in the hyperspectral machine learning literature. The proposed pipeline brings together unsupervised and self-supervised algorithms in a unified system to map minerals on a mine face without the need for human-annotated training data. The pipeline is evaluated with a hyperspectral image dataset of an open-cut mine face comprising mineral ore martite and non-mineralised shale. The combined system is shown to produce a superior map to its constituent algorithms, and the consistency of its mapping capability is demonstrated using data acquired at two different times of day.

Lloyd Windrim, Rishi Ramakrishnan, Arman Melkumyan et al.

Hyperspectral imaging sensors are becoming increasingly popular in robotics applications such as agriculture and mining, and allow per-pixel thematic classification of materials in a scene based on their unique spectral signatures. Recently, convolutional neural networks have shown remarkable performance for classification tasks, but require substantial amounts of labelled training data. This data must sufficiently cover the variability expected to be encountered in the environment. For hyperspectral data, one of the main variations encountered outdoors is due to incident illumination, which can change in spectral shape and intensity depending on the scene geometry. For example, regions occluded from the sun have a lower intensity and their incident irradiance skewed towards shorter wavelengths. In this work, a data augmentation strategy based on relighting is used during training of a hyperspectral convolutional neural network. It allows training to occur in the outdoor environment given only a small labelled region, which does not need to sufficiently represent the geometric variability of the entire scene. This is important for applications where obtaining large amounts of training data is labourious, hazardous or difficult, such as labelling pixels within shadows. Radiometric normalisation approaches for pre-processing the hyperspectral data are analysed and it is shown that methods based on the raw pixel data are sufficient to be used as input for the classifier. This removes the need for external hardware such as calibration boards, which can restrict the application of hyperspectral sensors in robotics applications. Experiments to evaluate the classification system are carried out on two datasets captured from a field-based platform.