AN APPROACH TO ROCK SIZE MEASUREMENT BASED ON A MODEL OF THE HUMAN VISUAL-SYSTEM

This paper describes research into the development of an instrument fo r the purpose of performing online measurement of rock size distributi ons using machine vision. Such an instrument would have application in the gold mining industry where it could be used to measure the fragme ntation of gold ore on a conveyor belt feed to an autogenous mill, for the purpose of controlling the mill. A computation structure has been developed to identify and delineate rocks in an image for the purpose of measuring their areas. It is based on the human visual system in t hat it consists of a low-level preattentive vision stage and a higher- level stage of attention focusing. Multiscalar image processing techni ques have also been integrated in order to improve the detection of ro cks across a wide range of sizes. A performance advantage can be obtai ned in this way because all the algorithms can be better matched to th e size of objects being detected. (C) 1997 Published by Elsevier Scien ce Ltd.