Tunnel and Underground Space ISSN:1225-1275(Print) 2287-1748(Online) 터널과 지하공간

Rock classification is fundamental discipline of exploring geological and geotechnical features in a site, which, however, may not be easy works because of high diversity of rock shape and color according to its origin, geological history and so on. With the great success of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in many different image-based classification tasks, there has been increasing interest in taking advantage of CNN to classify geological material. In this study, a feasibility of the deep CNN is investigated for automatically and accurately identifying rock types, focusing on the condition of various shapes and colors even in the same rock type. It can be further developed to a mobile application for assisting geologist in classifying rocks in fieldwork. The structure of CNN model used in this study is based on a deep residual neural network (ResNet), which is an ultra-deep CNN using in object detection and classification. The proposed CNN was trained on 10 typical rock types with an overall accuracy of 84% on the test set. The result demonstrates that the proposed approach is not only able to classify rock type using images, but also represents an improvement as taking highly diverse rock image dataset as input.