Intelligent Identification of Maceral Components of Coal Based on Image Segmentation and Classification

An intelligent analytical technique which is able to accurately identify maceral components is highly desired in the fields of mining and geology. However, currently available methods based on fixed-size window neglect the shape information, and thus do not work in identifying maceral composition from one entire photomicrograph. To address these concerns, we propose a novel Maceral Identification strategy based on image Segmentation and Classification (MISC). Considering the complex and heterogeneous nature of coal, a two-level coarse-to-fine clustering method based on K-means is employed to divide microscopic images into a sequence of regions with similar attributes (i.e., binder, vitrinite, liptinite and inertinite). Furthermore, comprehensive features along with random forest are utilized to automatically classify binder and seven types of maceral components, including vitrinite, fusinite, semifusinite, cutinite, sporinite, inertodetrinite and micrinite. Evaluations on 39 microscopic images show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of 90.44% and serves as the baseline for future research on maceral analysis. In addition, to support the decisions of petrologists during maceral analysis, we developed a standalone software, which is freely available at https:/github.com/GuyooGu/MISC-Master.