The rising resource demands in emerging economies have intensified resource nationalism in mineral-rich countries, necessitating more efficient mineral processing technologies for declining ore grades. This study presents BGF-YOLO, a novel deep learning model enhanced from YOLOv8, designed to optimize mineral beneficiation by accurately identifying mineral species and grain sizes using hyperspectral imaging. The system utilizes hyperspectral data spanning 66 spectral bands (400–1000 nm) and processes large datasets through advanced feature fusion and attention mechanisms. BGF-YOLO integrates a Generalized Feature Pyramid Network (GFPN), Dual-Level Routing Attention (DLRA), and an additional detection head to improve multi-scale feature detection and reduce redundant information. Evaluated on a dataset of 4,975 samples across five mineral classes, the model achieved an overall accuracy of 91.9%, with Galena and Hematite large particles attaining 94.9% and 100.0% accuracy, respectively. Comparative analysis showed that BGF-YOLO outperforms the baseline YOLOv8 by approximately 5% in accuracy. These results demonstrate the potential of combining hyperspectral imaging with advanced deep learning architectures to enhance the precision and efficiency of mineral classification and grain size determination in beneficiation processes.
Research Article
Open Access