Competitive voting-based multi-class prediction for ore selection

Sensor-based intelligent sorting technology is a mineral separation technology with the merits of high-efficiency, energy-saving and water-saving. However, the prediction accuracy of conventional machine learning methods is unstable in multi-class selection of ores. The purpose of this study is to propose a competitive voting method to improve the multi-class prediction accuracy of ores in machine vision-based sorting system by combining the classification advantages of various machine learning methods. The operations of image segmentation, feature extraction and feature selection are presented to obtain the multi-class datasets. Three ones of traditional machine learning models with higher classification accuracies are used to establish competitive voting classification models. A case study using the image data of a gas coal shows the merits of the proposed approach. Results derived using this competitive voting approach reveal that it outperforms pre-existing approaches