A Feature Extraction Method Using Auditory Nerve Response for Collapsing Coal-Gangue Recognition

Abstract

To intelligentize the top-coal caving’s process, many data-driven coal-gangue recognition techniques have been proposed recently. However, practical applications of these techniques are hindered by coal mine underground’s high background noise and complex environment. Considering that workers distinguish coal and gangue by hearing the impact sounds on the hydraulic support, we proposed a novel feature extraction method based on an auditory nerve (AN) response model simulating the human auditory system. Firstly, vibration signals were measured by an acceleration sensor mounted on the back of the hydraulic support’s tail beam, and then they were converted into acoustic pressure signals. Secondly, an AN response model of different characteristic frequencies was applied to process these signals, whose output constituted the auditory spectrum for feature extraction. Meanwhile, a feature selection method integrated with variance was used to reduce redundant information of the original features. Finally, a support vector machine was employed as the classifier model in this work. The proposed method was tested and evaluated on experimental datasets collected from the Tashan Coal Mine in China. In addition, its recognition accuracy was compared with other coal-gangue recognition methods based on commonly used features. The results show that our proposed method can reach a superior recognition accuracy of 99.23% and presents better generalization ability.