Abstract
Widespread ground fissures caused by coal mining subsidence are a main cause of ecological destruction in coal mining areas, and the rapid monitoring of ground fissures is essential for ecological restoration. Traditional fissure monitoring technologies are time consuming and laborious. Therefore, we developed a method to automatically extract ground fissures from high-resolution UAV images. First, a multiscale Hessian-based enhancement filter was utilized to enhance the ground fissures in grayscale images. Then, a simple single-thresholding operation was applied to segment the enhanced image to generate a binary ground fissure map. Finally, incomplete path opening was performed to eliminate the noises in the fissure extraction results. We selected the N1212 working face of the Ningtiaota Coal Mine in Shenmu County, China, as the study area. The results indicated that the ranges of correctness, completeness, and the kappa coefficient of the extracted results were 66.23–79.00%, 69.03–73.22%, and 67.91–75.88%, respectively. Image resolution is the key factor for successful fissure detection; the method proposed in this paper can extract ground fissures with a width greater than one pixel (2.64 cm), and the detection ratio for fissures with a width greater than two pixels was over 87%. Our research has solved the problem of the rapid monitoring of ground fissures to a certain extent and can act as a valuable tool for ecological restoration in mining areas.
Highlights
Coal is a valuable chemical material and energy source that has long held the second largest share of world energy consumption, with total world production exceeding 7500 Mt in 2020 [1]
The fissure extraction results and ground truth were used to establish a confusion matrix, and the correctness, completeness, and kappa coefficient were calculated as the evaluation indexes to determine the extraction accuracy
An image processing chain was developed to extract ground fissures through high-resolution UAV images, and it was tested on the working face of the Ningtiaota Coal Mine in order to realize the automatic extraction of ground fissures caused by coal mining subsidence
Summary
Coal is a valuable chemical material and energy source that has long held the second largest share of world energy consumption, with total world production exceeding 7500 Mt in 2020 [1]. Coal mining has created a series of environmental degradation problems. Coal mining can be divided into open-pit and underground mining. Unlike open-pit mining, which directly damages the ground, underground mining causes ground subsidence by destroying the underground rock strata, affecting the ecological environment. Ground fissures created due to mining subsidence cause changes in soil properties, reduce soil quality [3], and decrease surface soil moisture [4] in the region where they are distributed. Ground fissures result in mechanical damage to plant roots [5,6], affecting the expected growth of vegetation, leading to vegetation degradation and aggravated soil erosion in coal mining areas [7,8].
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