SNW YOLOv8: Improving the YOLOv8 Network for Real-Time Monitoring of Lump Coal

Due to the large size of the coal and the high mining output, lump coal is one of the hidden risks of mining conveyor damage. Typically, lump coal can cause jamming and even damage to the conveyor belt during the coal mining and transportation process. This study proposes a novel real-time detection method for lump coal on a conveyor belt. The Space-to-Depth Conv (SPD-Conv) module is introduced into the feature extraction network to extract the features of the mine's low-resolution lump coal. To enhance the feature extraction capability of the model, the Normalization-based Attention Module (NAM) is combined to adjust weight sparsity. After loss function optimization using the Wise-IoU v3 (WIoU v3) module, the SPD-Conv-NAM-WIoU v3 YOLOv8 (SNW YOLO v8) model is proposed. The experimental results show that the SNW YOLOv8 model outperforms the widely used model (YOLOv8) in terms of precision and recall by 15.82% and 11.71%, respectively. Significantly, the real-time detection speed of the SNW YOLOv8 model is increased to 192.93 f/s. Compared to normal models, the SNW YOLO v8 model overcomes the disadvantages of normal models, such as being overweight, and the parameters of SNW YOLO v8 are reduced to only 6.04 million with a small model volume of 12.3 MB. Meanwhile, the floating point of SNW YOLOv8 is significantly reduced. Consequently, it demonstrates excellent lump coal detection performance, which may open up a new window for coal mining optimization.