Bubble tracking system in industrial mixture

Interactive panel with graphs
Industrial area

Computer vision

Backstory

EORA loves hackathons: they help us keep in shape and create new things. At the hackathon, many of the EORA's projects were invented, and then finalized within the framework of business tasks. This project is one of them.

Customer

One of the largest mining and metallurgical companies in Russia.
Illustration of a metallurgical plant

Task

Create a service that allows to evaluate the characteristics of industrial foam during flotation process. The data is transmitted to the operator in a convenient form.

What is flotation

This is the extraction of non-ferrous metals (e.g. copper, nickel) from the rock. The rock is crushed, mixed with water and reagents and foamed. The rock settles, and non-ferrous metals remain in the foam.
Still from a video of the flotation process
Still from a video of the flotation process

Solution

Bubble tracking program based on computer vision technology.

How it works

Information panel (generation and display)
Data analysis inside the program
Computer (running the program)
Video camera (receiving video stream)
Flotation process
Knowing the location and direction of movement of bubbles, we can determine more than 10 characteristics of industrial foam:
foam color
the velocity of bubble formation
frequency of bubble disappearance
number of bubbles
average size of bubbles
direction and speed of foam movement
size of bubbles (small, medium, large)

Technologies

classical methods of computer vision (CV)
advanced methods of deep learning (DL)
классические методы компьютерного зрения (CV)

Development process

классические методы компьютерного зрения (CV)
Data markup

Step 01

Selection of the best methods for solving the task

Step 02

Interface design

Step 03

Computer model training

Step 04

Testing and debugging the solution

Step 05

Development time

классические методы компьютерного зрения (CV)
April 16-18, 2021
3 days

interesting fact

We took the first place in our track. In total, there were 23 teams from 65 regions at the hackathon

Advantage of the service

Using a simple linear algorithm, we can predict the trajectory of the foam flow for a few seconds ahead. The prediction accuracy is very high.
This allows to:
Before developing, we studied similar products that exist on the market. None of them reads as many foam parameters as ours.
reduce reagent and water costs
increase the metal recovery rate

Project team

Sergey Solovyov
ML engineer
Valery Shlyapnikov
Designer, fullstack developer
Nikita Buzanov
CV/DS engineer
Andrey Ragimov
CV/DS engineer

Results

The hackathon organizer successfully uses an analog of our service in production
The EORA program gives an increase in the extraction of useful components by 0.3-0.4% (that's a lot)

Service potential

The effectiveness of the training will increase significantly if synthetic data is generated and a neural network is trained on them.
Individual tracking of each foam bubble is possible
You can significantly speed up the service due to high-quality video processing
If you install depth cameras, you can determine the height of the foam without sensors

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