Machine vision based damage detection for conveyor belt safety using Fusion knowledge distillation

A belt conveyor system is one of the essential equipment in coal mining. The damages to conveyor belts are hazardous because they would affect the stable operation of a belt conveyor system whilst impairing the coal mining efficiency. To address these problems, a novel conveyor belt damage detection method based on CenterNet is proposed in this paper. The fusion of feature-wise and response-wise knowledge distillation is proposed, which balances the performance and size of the proposed deep neural network. The Fused Channel-Spatial Attention is proposed to compress the latent feature maps efficiently, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence is introduced to minimize the distribution distance between student and teacher networks. Experimental results show that the proposed lightweight object detection model reaches 92.53% mAP and 65.8 FPS. The proposed belt damage detection system can detect conveyor belt damages efficiently and accurately, which indicates its high potential to deploy on end devices.