The belt conveyor is an essential piece of equipment in coal mining for coal transportation, and its stable operation is key to efficient production. Belt surface of the conveyor is vulnerable to foreign bodies which can be extremely destructive. In the past decades, much research and numerous approaches to inspect belt status have been proposed, and machine learning-based non-destructive testing (NDT) methods are becoming more and more popular. Deep learning (DL), as a branch of machine learning (ML), has been widely applied in data mining, natural language processing, pattern recognition, image processing, etc. Generative adversarial networks (GAN) are one of the deep learning methods based on generative models and have been proved to be of great potential. In this paper, a novel multi-classification conditional CycleGAN (MCC-CycleGAN) method is proposed to generate and discriminate surface images of damages of conveyor belt. A novel architecture of improved CycleGAN is designed to enhance the classification performance using a limited capacity images dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed deep learning network can generate realistic belt surface images with defects and efficiently classify different damaged images of the conveyor belt surface.
Keywords: conditional CycleGAN; damage detection; incremental image fusion; transfer learning.