Intelligent Gangue Sorting System Based on Dual-Energy X-ray and Improved YOLOv5 Algorithm

Intelligent gangue sorting with high precision is of vital importance for improving coal quality. To tackle the challenges associated with coal gangue target detection, including algorithm performance imbalance and hardware deployment difficulties, in this paper, an intelligent gangue separation system that adopts the elevated YOLO-v5 algorithm and dual-energy X-rays is proposed. Firstly, images of dual-energy X-ray transmission coal gangue mixture under the actual operation of a coal mine were collected, and datasets for training and validation were self-constructed. Then, in the YOLOv5 backbone network, the EfficientNetv2 was used to replace the original cross stage partial darknet (CSPDarknet) to achieve the lightweight of the backbone network; in the neck, a light path aggregation network (LPAN) was designed based on PAN, and a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was integrated into the BottleneckCSP of the feature fusion block to raise the feature acquisition capability of the network and maximize the learning effect. Subsequently, to accelerate the rate of convergence, an efficient intersection over union (EIOU) was used instead of the complete intersection over union (CIOU) loss function. Finally, to address the problem of low resolution of small targets leading to missed detection, an L2 detection head was introduced to the head section to improve the multi-scale target detection performance of the algorithm. The experimental results indicate that in comparison with YOLOv5-S, the same version of the algorithm proposed in this paper increases by 19.2% and 32.4% on mAP @.5 and mAP @.5:.95, respectively. The number of parameters decline by 51.5%, and the calculation complexity declines by 14.7%. The algorithm suggested in this article offers new ideas for the design of identification algorithms for coal gangue sorting systems, which is expected to save energy and reduce consumption, reduce labor, improve efficiency, and be more friendly to the embedded platform.