Abstract:
The environment of open-pit mines is distinctive, and the conditions of the roads in them are complex and constantly changing. Insufficient lighting in the area being mined can make it challenging to identify and position multiple targets on the roads. This, in turn, affects the results of detection and poses serious risks to the safe operation of uncrewed mining trucks.Currently available models to identify obstacles on roads cannot accommodate the impact of poor lighting, and thus, yield inaccurate results. They also have significant shortcomings in identifying small obstacles in the mining area. In this study, we develop a multi-target model of detection for the dark/light environment of an open-pit mine using hyperbolic embedding to address the above-mentioned issues. We introduce the Retinex-Net convolutional neural network to the image preprocessing stage of the detection model to enhance dark images and improve their clarity. To address the issue of an excessively large number of features in the dataset without a clear preference for focus, we incorporate the global attention mechanism into the improved process of feature extraction. This enabled the collection of critical feature-related information in three dimensions. Finally, we incorporate a fully connected hyperbolic layer into the prediction stage of the model to minimize feature loss and prevent overfitting. The results of experiments to verify the proposed model showed that ① it could reliably classify and accurately identify large-scale targets in the low-light environment of the open-pit mining area, and was able to highly accurately identify mining trucks and small vehicles over long distances. It could also accurately identify and locate scaled targets, including pedestrians, such that this satisfies meeting the safety-related requirements of uncrewed mining trucks operating in diverse environments.② The model achieved an accuracy of detection of 98.6% while maintaining a speed of 51.52 frames/s, where this was 20.31%, 18.51%, 10.53%, 8.39%, and 13.24% higher than the accuracies of the SSD, YOLOv4, YOLOv5, YOLOx, and YOLOv7, respectively. Its accuracy of detection of pedestrians, mining trucks, and excavators on mining roads exceeded 97%.