IMAGE SEGMENTATION FOR MINERAL IDENTIFICATION IN

AN OXIDE COPPER DEPOSIT

Álvaro F. Egaña V. and Julián M. Ortiz

Department of Mining Engineering, University of Chile, Chile
ALGES Laboratory – Advanced Mining Technology Center (AMTC), University of Chile,
Chile

ABSTRACT
Mine plans and the performance of metallurgical processes define the success of a mining
endeavour. These plans are based on a block model that characterizes the spatial distribution
of relevant variables. Geometallurgical variables are increasingly being considered in these
models due to their importance in the definition of the processes and destination of each block
in the mine plans. The correct characterization of the mineralogical proportions of ore and
gangue is extremely important for this purpose. This is currently done manually, during the
logging of drill cores. This procedure is slow, does not provide satisfactory precision for its use
in quantitative analysis and is generally biased towards ore mineral species, rather than
gangue, the latter being more relevant for mineral processing and metallurgy. Nonetheless, this
procedure allows for acquiring knowledge useful for the genetic interpretation of the deposit
and the definition of the spatial distribution of geological units.

We propose an automated approach for determining the mineralogical proportions in drill

cores, from high resolution digital images, within the visible spectrum. The method consists in
extracting the colour characteristic of each pixel of the image and segmenting by the
determination of thresholds in the colour histogram. This is done by using a non-supervised
statistical procedure. This methodology can be easily extended to incorporate other features
such as edges and textures. The results are applied to images of drill cores from a Chilean
oxide copper deposit to identify the mineral species relevant for the metallurgical processes. We
show results and their statistical validations, which demonstrates the value that this information
has, eases the logging and increases the amount of information available as input for a
predictive geometallurgical model.

This methodology is seen as the base of a larger, semi-supervised mineralogical proportions

logging system that can help the geologist understand the deposit and improve its
interpretation, as it allows for generating abundant information from the logging procedure
and reducing the time to gather that information.

INTRODUCTION
Mining an ore deposit requires knowing the distribution of the resources, having a strategy for
their extraction in time through a mine plan and understanding the metallurgical performance
that these reserves will have through the processes considered for the recovery of the elements
of interest. For all these steps, a correct characterization of the resources and reserves is
required. In practice, the characterization is based on the logging of drill holes and the
integration of several sources of geological, structural and geophysical information.

Drill holes are an important source of information to understand the geology and the distribution
of grades in a mineral deposit. Diamond drilling provides very rich information because the
recovered core can be logged for the geological characterization of rock types, mineralization,
alteration and lithologies. Furthermore, the core is split and part of it goes to destructive tests
through sample preparation for chemical analysis to determine the grade of the elements of
interest and impurities.

Logging of cores becomes of paramount importance [1,2], since this is the process where the
geology team learns about the deposition conditions, types of geological events, and
chronological sequence and superposition of mineralization and alteration events. This requires
a careful inspection of the cores.

Current practice considers a qualitative assessment of mineral proportions within the core and
definition of alteration type based on the appreciation of the sample mineralogy. These
assessments are often backed up by more expensive analysis, including spectrophotometry, X-
ray diffraction analysis and scanning electron microscope. Several systems of quantitative
mineralogical analysis exist that provide a detailed description of the minerals, grain sizes and
relationships for liberation analysis purposes, among others [3]. These attributes are extremely
relevant for the geometallurgical characterization of the different geological units. Additionally,
it is common practice to photograph the samples to keep a record, which can be beneficial for
geotechnical assessments. However, this image is not systematically used as an information
source.

Overall, the process is lengthy, very demanding of geological expertise and only partial
information is finally translated to the numerical model.

We focus on a procedure to improve the speed of geological logging and enrich the information
that is finally transferred to the data base and to the numerical model that characterizes the
deposit, hence improving its quality and forecasting capacity in terms of the plant performance.

QUANTITATIVE MINERALOGY
The correct characterization of the mineral species existing in an ore has been highlighted as a
very relevant aspect to improve the knowledge and understanding of a mineral deposit.
Understanding the mineralogical changes in the ore, alterations and lithologies can be a
significant help for defining exploration targets and identifying the alteration halo in which a
sample is taken, in order to improve the genetic model of deposition of ore in a mineral
occurrence [4].

Traditional techniques often rely on manual counting of particles and estimations of their
volume through microscopic analysis of thin or polished sections, generating problems related
to their statistical representativeness in the case of highly variable mineralizations with coarse
particles, and with the subjective nature of the manual work by a mineralogist.

Several approaches are available for the quantitative mineralogical determination with
application to many fields: determination of gold mineralogy [3], investigation of contaminated
sites [5], characterization of rocks for the metals and energy industries [6, 7, 8], geometallurgy,
environmental and biological applications [9], flotation performance forecasting and
optimization [10], comminution modelling [11].

The analytical response of the sample must be compared to a reference response for known
mineral species. Each technique works well under certain conditions, however, these analyses
must be supported by other complementary techniques to validate their results [3].

In all the cases, the use of automatic systems allows for:

 Increasing the available information extracted from the samples

 Reducing the problem of statistical representativeness, as many analysis can be done at a
low cost
 Reducing the subjectivity related to a manual analysis, where fatigue, experience of the
mineralogist and the focus of the analysis can bias the results.

Currently, the most popular techniques for quantitative mineralogy are based on scanning
electron microscope. These techniques are generally costly and cannot process a very large
amount of samples to provide a reliable statistical characterization of the ore. Notwithstanding
this limitation, the precision and quality of the information that can be retrieved from these
analyses remains unquestioned and they should be used as calibration of faster and less costly
methods. In the next section we discuss the use of digital photographs for the determination of
mineralogy.

IMAGE ANALYSIS

Automated mineralogical species characterization starting from drill core digital images is, from
a computer science point of view, a feature recognition and classification problem. The latter
are complimentary functions that lie at the high end in the field of image analysis. In our case,
classification deals with the procedure of establishing criteria to distinguish different
populations of mineralogical species represented by some kind of well defined features.
Recognition is the process which uses classification tools to find a particular mineralogical
species within an image.

In image analysis and computer vision, image segmentation is one of the most important tasks
because it is usually the starting point of more complex techniques such as feature recognition
and classification [12]. The goal of image segmentation algorithms is to partition the image into
a number of disjoint classes with similar nearly-uniform properties. The output should always
be a set of visually distinguishable regions within the image. For a drill core digital image, those
regions are the superset which contains the different candidates to be classified and recognized
as mineralogical species. A feature is any property that can be extracted from an image. Texture
and colour are two such image properties. Probably because they are a natural approach they
have received significant attention from the research community. Most of the initial research
has examined these two properties as separate entities due to the fact that considering them as a
single descriptor has been more difficult than initially anticipated [13]. But recent attempts have
addressed the problem of joining colour and texture as a single feature with rather good results
[14].

Since our research is at early stages we are choosing colour feature as a starting point to also
include the texture feature in a near future.
Colour has received significant attention from the research community motivated by the ever-
increasing advances in imaging and hardware processing techniques and the proliferation of
digital colour cameras. Colour itself has been used in the development of algorithms for
applications including feature recognition, skin detection, image indexing and retrieval, and
product classification.

Colour segmentation algorithms can be divided into three main classes:

 Pixel-based techniques are built on the assumption that colour is a property locally
constant in the image that can be examined using statistical methods such as histogram
thresholding or clustering.
 Area-based techniques divide the image in an arbitrary initial number of regions, often
randomly generated, to start a merging process based on uniformity criteria until a
stability condition is reached.
 Physics-based techniques work on the assumption that, commonly irregular illumination
conditions, scene objects shape and reflection characteristics are all known properties;
this way colour is treated as a result of highlights and shadows generated from those
factors.

We focus on a combination of pixel-based and area-based algorithms, because using just the
earlier tend to produce over segmentation at a fine level. In our case this is seen as an advantage
due to the extremely irregular shape of mineralogical species. But this is not enough to produce
suitable results. Thus, a pixel-based histogram thresholding algorithm is used to produce an
initial rough segmentation that is used to feed an area-based algorithm which will produce a
final segmentation where coherence of adjacent colours is preserved. Physics-based algorithms
inclusion was put off until we move forward, if it is actually needed to have a better control over
the image capture process.

METHODOLOGY
The approach for data gathering from drill holes can be described as follows. Firstly, a
calibration and training process is required which will feed the expert system. Then, this expert
system will be supervised by the logging geologist, but will speed up the process of data
acquisition.

The training process considers the following steps.

 Capture of digital photograph of the drill hole core

 Automated image analysis to determine a number of distinct categories
 Supervised calibration of the number of categories
 Labeling of the categories, associating them to mineralogies
 Analysis of characteristic vector of each category based on colour and texture
distributions
 Training of expert system.

This work is required for the first few samples. Once the system has enough information, the
process becomes semi-supervised:

 Capture of digital photograph of the drill hole core

 Automated image analysis to identify known mineralogies and define unclassified
categories
 Check identified mineralogies, update if necessary, and label new categories as new
mineralogies or assign to existing categories
  Update characteristic vector of each category
 Update the expert system.

The process of automated image analysis to define the categories that will then be labelled by
the logging geologist is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Image analysis procedures

It should be noticed that the identification of mineral species is a difficult problem and in most
techniques a matching procedure is used based on a database of characteristics for each species,
which has to be tailored to the specific site under investigation [10].

EXAMPLE APPLICATION AND DESCRIPTION

To illustrate the image analysis previously presented, an example application is shown. Digital
photographs from an oxide copper deposit are collected for a pilot test of the methodology. The
samples are logged to describe the abundance of the following minerals: iron oxides intensity,
copper oxides intensity, chrysocolla, atacamite, copper pitch, copper wad, clays, magnetite,
anhydrite, gypsum, carbonates.

The original picture (Figure 2a) is first cleaned of spurious pixels by applying a gaussian filter.
These filter parameters are set up to preserve colour contact zones while smoothing the rest of
the image as much as possible. Then a colour quantizer is applied to avoid filling up the image
statistics with redundant colour information [15]. Then the image is converted from the RGB
space (red, green, blue) to HSV (hue, saturation, value). Only the hue channel is used as the
colour source. The colour histogram is constructed and a first segmentation is done by
considering each individual mode in the curve (Figure 2b) [16]. This process evidently over
segments the values, generating too many classes (Figure 2c). A statistical procedure to identify
meaningful modes reduces the number of classes (Figures 2d and 2e). Further refinement can be
obtained (Figure 2f).
 (a) (b)

(c) (d)

(e) (f)
Figure 2: (a) Original image; (b) Segmentation based on the identification of modes in the colour histogram; (c) First
segmentation; (d) Segmentation based on the identification of meaningful models in the histogram; (e) Improved
segmentation; and (f) Refined segmentation based on calibration defined by the user.

The procedure to find meaningful modes in a histogram can be summarized as follows:

 First, a definition of 'meaningful interval' is needed [17]. We say that an interval [a, b] is
statistically meaningful if there is a value c inside of it such that the interval [a, c] is
statistically increasing and the interval [c, b] is statistically decreasing.
 There are many ways to define what statistically increasing (decreasing) is. In our case,
we say that the increasing (decreasing) property is preserved if the interval contains no
statistically meaningful valleys or peaks. We check the latter by comparing the
histogram interval against the same interval in a known increasing (decreasing) density
function.
 Once we know how to find meaningful intervals we are able to say that a meaningful
mode is the statistically unique mode of a meaningful interval.
 With the previous definition a process can be outlined to find all the meaningful modes in
a histogram:
  Observe that the interval between two local minima is a meaningful interval
according to our definition. Having this in mind, we define the set of intervals
between all local minima as the finest histogram partition which is statistically
acceptable.
 The finest histogram partition is then refined by looking at all the adjacent
intervals that can be merged preserving the meaningful interval property. The
process stops when there are no more intervals to merge.

Figure 2b shows the finest partition and the result of the merging process.

CONCLUSIONS
Mining endeavours require appropriate information, models and plans to perform correctly. The
characterization of the ore sent to the different processes may help forecast the performance and
define the best process for each zone of the deposit. One of the most critical aspects of the ore
characterization is understanding its mineralogy. Current practice bases most of the decisions on
a qualitative logging of the mineralogy. Cores from diamond drill hole samples may be used to
improve the knowledge of the deposit, providing a wealth of information about mineralogies
and other rock characteristics. We presented an approach based on the analysis of digital images
from drill hole cores, which can discriminate between different mineralogical species in a semi-
supervised mode, constituting the basis of an expert system currently under development.

The segmentation is based on the colour channel of the image. Meaningful modes are identified
and statistically tested, and the image is pre and post processed to segment in a number of
classes that can be controlled by the user.

Current results are promising in terms of the discrimination capacity of the algorithms
developed; however, there are many steps to be completed. Incorporating textures is an
important step to improve the characterization. The matching between the automatic
classification and the mineralogical species, done by the geologist, must feed the expert system
that has yet to be tested. Finally, a friendly user interface is also required to facilitate the work.

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