Automated Detection and Analysis of Massive Mining Waste Deposits Using Sentinel-2 Satellite Imagery and Artificial Intelligence

This article presents a method to detect and segment mine waste deposits, specifically waste rock dumps and leaching wasted dumps, in Sentinel-2 satellite imagery using artificial intelligence. This challenging task has important implications for mining companies and regulators like the National Geology and Mining Service in Chile. Challenges include limited knowledge of mine waste deposit numbers, as well as logistical and technical difficulties in conducting inspections and surveying physical stability parameters. The proposed method combines YOLOv7 object detection with a vision transformer classifier to locate mine waste deposits, as well as a deep generative model for data augmentation to enhance detection and segmentation accuracy. The ViT classifier achieved 98% accuracy in differentiating five satellite imagery scene types, while the YOLOv7 model achieved an average precision of 81% for detection and 79% for segmentation of mine waste deposits. Finally, the model was used to calculate mine waste deposit areas, with an absolute error of 6.6% compared to Google Earth API results.