Datarock CEO Liam Webb speaking at AUSIMM in the "The future of mining and mining geology - advances in technology, AI and automation" session. Liam presented on our work extracting geological information from drill core imagery using deep learning. https://www.datarock.com.au/

1. The application of deep learning to extract
geological information from drill core imagery
Liam Webb, Mark Grujic and Dr. Duy Tin Truong

2. Question: Can we replicate every day geological tasks using
commonly acquired core photography and a neural network?

3. • Mask – R-CNN
• Pre-processing of imagery
• RQD
• Unsupervised Lithological Domaining
• How does it all fit?

4. Problem: Every core photo is different – anything we build
needs to be flexible and adaptable.

5. Solution: Mask R-CNN
1980 – CNN – Kunihiko Fukushima
2013 - R-CNN - Ross Girshick, Jeff Donahue, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra
Malik
2015 - Fast R-CNN - Ross Girshick
2015 - Faster R-CNN - Shaoqing Ren, Kaiming He, Ross Girshick, Jian Sun
2017 - Mask R-CNN - Kaiming He, Georgia Gkioxari, Piotr Dollár, Ross
Girshick
October 2019 - Detectron II - Facebook
https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2018/11/19/mask-r-cnn-with-opencv/

6. 1.3
-0.8 2.2
0.2
-2.2 1.7
0.2 0.6
2048 per image
1.3
-0.8 2.2
0.2
-2.2 1.7
0.2 0.6
2048 per image

7. Input Image:

8. Box and Row cropping

9. Empty space

10. Empty space

11. Core Blocks

13. Optical Character Recognition

14. Optical Character Recognition

15. Depth Registration

16. RQD

18. 179 – 182m
170-172m

19. 1.3
-0.8 2.2
0.2
-2.2 1.7
0.2 0.6
Unsupervised Lithological
Classification

23. • Deep learning models can potentially be used to
replicate any visual task done manually by a geologist.
• If properly trained, the performance should be
equivalent or superior to a human, mostly due to an
increase in consistency and auditability.
• Models can be updated to reflect new geological
concepts and backwards propagated to historical data.
• These algorithms can be applied to imagery
immediately after acquisition and provide rapid
results, meaning that they could be integrated into
existing workflows without disruption.
• Results can be integrated with other data sources (lab
at rig XRF, hyperspectral scanning, laser profiling etc)
to build more complex products.
Implementation