| A knowledge based approach to nding xed size rocks within an image is described. It is intended to be a building block within a mul-tiresolution system. Each point is hypothe-sised to be a rock and a region surrounding it is labelled using knowledge of rock characteristics. Twelve features are then measured and used to test the hypothesis by means of a combination of thresholding and k-neares...

When examining a rock mass, joint sets and their orientations can play a signiicant role with regard to how the rock mass will behave. To identify joint sets present in the rock mass, measurements of the orientation of individual fractures can be measured on exposed rock faces and the resulting data examined for heterogeneity. In this paper, the EM algorithm is utilized to t mixtures of Kent co...

A spectral feature selection scheme is proposed for multi-class automated rock recognition from real world drilling data using Gaussian Process classification. This work is part of a larger project aimed at surface mine automation. The motivation for this research is to investigate which combination of drilling data measurements is most relevant for rock recognition. We conduct feature selectio...

wall displacements and ground pressure acting on the lining of a tunnel increase with time. these time-dependent deformations are both due to face advance effect and to the time-dependent behavior of the rock mass.  viscoelastic materials exhibit both viscous and elastic behaviors. thorough this study, the effect of different linear viscoelastic models including maxwell, kelvin and kelvin-voigt...

Data on discontinuities are always necessary for design, characterization and analysis of rock structures. The time honored method of manual measurements with Brunton compass is both time consuming and often inconvenient given issues such as restricted access to measurement areas, introduction of erroneous data due to sampling difficulties and human bias, considerable safety risks since measure...

In this paper, we consider the use of texture granularity in the classification and retrieval of natural rock images. In rock science, the rock images are nowadays stored into large image databases. In the images, there often occur large grains which differ clearly from rock texture. The purpose of this work is to find grain rock images from the database. We present two approaches to this purpo...

In order to analyze the slope stability in open-pit mines, the structural parameters of rock mass such as persistence and spatial orientation of discontinuities are characterized through field surveys, which involve spending high costs and times as well as posing high risks of rock toppling and rock fall. In the present work, a new application of terrestrial digital photogrammetry is introduced...

Intact rock properties together with rock mass characteristics should be well investigated for selection of proper tunnel boring machine (TBM) for tunneling in various ground conditions. This is due to the significant impact of rock mass characteristics on machine performance. TBMs are site specific and designed for optimal performance in given ground conditions. When selected and put to work a...