Quantitative analysis of coal particle size based on bi-level routing attention mechanism

The distribution features of coal particle size are closely related to the analysis of methane gas propagation in coal. At present, the coal particle size analysis method based on image segmentation has become one of the mainstream solutions to obtain coal particle size. But there are problems such as loss of contextual information, improper fusion of coal particle features resulting in missed segmentation and over-segmentation of coal particles. In order to solve the above problems, a coal particle size analysis model based on bi-level routing attention (BRA) is designed. The BRA module is embedded in the residual U-shaped network ResNet-UNet to obtain the B-ResUNet network model. To reduce the problem of missed segmentation in coal particle segmentation, a BRA module is added before upsampling in the ResNet-UNet network. It allows the network to adjust the importance of the current feature layer based on the features of the previous layer, enhance the expression capability of features, and improve the transmission capability of long-distance information. To reduce the problem of over segmentation in coal particle segmentation, a BRA module is added after the feature concatenation module of the ResNet-UNet network. By dynamically selecting and aggregating important features, more effective feature fusion is achieved. The feature information from the segmented coal particles is extracted. The coal particle size of the coal particle dataset used in the experimental analysis is equivalent to the cell size. In order to accurately characterize the coal particle size, equivalent circular particle size is used to obtain the coal particle size and size distribution. The experimental results show the following points. ① The accuracy, average intersection to union ratio, and recall of the B-ResUNet network model have been improved by 06.%, 14.3%, and 35.9% compared to the ResNet-UNet basic network, with an accuracy of 99.6%, an average intersection to union ratio of 92.6%, and a recall of 94.4%. The B-ResUNet network model has good segmentation performance in coal samples and can detect relatively complete particle structures. ② When the BRA module is introduced before upsampling and after feature concatenation, the network pays sufficient attention to the edge areas of coal particles and reduces attention to some less important areas, thereby improving the computational efficiency of the network. ③ The particle size of coal particles shows a relatively balanced distribution trend within 1-2 mm, with the maximum proportion of coal particles within 1-2 mm being 99.04% and the minimum being 90.59%. It indicates that the image processing method based on BRA has high accuracy in particle size analysis.