Research on Image Detection of Thin-Vein Precious Metal Ores and Rocks Based on Improved YOLOv8n

To address the high-dilution issues arising from efficient mining methods such as medium-deep drilling for underground thin veins of precious metals, detecting raw rock fragments after blasting for subsequent sorting has become a cutting-edge research focus. With the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence, deep learning offers novel applications for rock detection. Accordingly, this study employs an improved lightweight YOLOv8n model to detect two typical thin-vein precious metal ores: gold ore and wolframite. In consideration of the computational resource constraints in underground environments, a triple optimization strategy is proposed. First, GhostConv and C2f-Ghost modules were introduced into the backbone network to reduce redundant computations while preserving feature representation capabilities. Second, the VoVGSCSP module was incorporated into the neck to further decrease model parameters and computational load. Finally, the ECA mechanism was embedded before the SPPF pooling layer to enhance feature extraction for ores and rocks, thereby improving detection accuracy. The results demonstrate that the GVE-YOLOv8 model contains only 2.28 million parameters—a 24.3% reduction compared to the original YOLOv8n. FLOPs decrease from 8.1 G to 5.6 G, and the model size reduces from 6.3 MB to 4.9 MB, while detection accuracy improves to 98.3% mAP50 and 95.3% mAP50-95. This enhanced model meets the performance requirements for accurately detecting raw ore and rock fragments after underground blasting, thereby providing a novel research method for thin-vein mining.