Rock Classification in Petrographic Thin Section Images Based on Concatenated Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Rock classification plays an important role in rock mechanics, petrology, mining engineering, magmatic processes, and numerous other fields pertaining to geosciences. This study proposes a concatenated convolutional neural network (Con-CNN) method for classifying the geologic rock type based on petrographic thin sections. Herein, plane polarized light (PPL) and crossed polarized light (XPL) were used to acquire thin section images as the fundamental data. After conducting the necessary pre-processing analyses, the PPL and XPL images as well as their comprehensive image (CI) were incorporated in three convolutional neural networks (CNNs) comprising the same structure for achieving a preliminary classification; these images were developed by employing the fused principal component analysis (PCA). Subsequently, the results of the CNNs were concatenated by using the maximum likelihood detection to obtain a comprehensive classification result. Finally, a statistical revision was applied to fix the misclassification due to the proportion difference of minerals that were similar in appearance. In this study, 13 types of 92 rock samples, 196 petrographic thin sections, 588 images, and 63504 image patches were fabricated for the training and validation of the Con-CNN. The five-folds cross validation shows that the method proposed provides an overall accuracy of 89.97%, which facilitates the automation of rock classification in petrographic thin sections.