Application of EMD-Based SVD and SVM to Coal-Gangue Interface Detection

Coal-gangue interface detection during top-coal caving mining is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a new vibration signal analysis approach to detecting the coal-gangue interface based on singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques and support vector machines (SVMs). Due to the nonstationary characteristics in vibration signals of the tail boom support of the longwall mining machine in this complicated environment, the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used to decompose the raw vibration signals into a number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by which the initial feature vector matrices can be formed automatically. By applying the SVD algorithm to the initial feature vector matrices, the singular values of matrices can be obtained and used as the input feature vectors of SVMs classifier. The analysis results of vibration signals from the tail boom support of a longwall mining machine show that the method based on EMD, SVD, and SVM is effective for coal-gangue interface detection even when the number of samples is small.