AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF MINERALS IN IMAGES OF POLISHED SECTIONS

Abstract

Automatic identification of minerals in images of polished section is highly demanded in exploratory geology as it can provide a significant reduction in time spent in the study of ores and eliminate the factor of misdiagnosis of minerals. The development of algorithms for automatic analysis of images of polished sections makes it possible to create of a universal tool for comparing ores from different deposits, which is also much in demand. The main contribution of this paper can be summed up in three parts: i) creation of LumenStone dataset (https://imaging.cs.msu.ru/en/research/geology/lumenstone) which unites high-quality geological images of different mineral associations and provides pixel-level semantic segmentation masks, ii) development of CNN-based neural network for automatic identification of minerals in images of polished sections, iii) implementation of software tool with graphical user interface that can be used by expert geologists to perform an automatic analysis of polished sections images.