A convolutional neural network model for marble quality classification

The fundamental policy of marble industries is to establish sustainable high-quality products in a standardized manner. Identification and classification of different types of marbles is a critical task that is usually carried out by human experts. However, marble quality classification by humans can be time-consuming, error-prone, inconsistent, and subjective. Automated and computerized approaches are required to obtain faster, more reliable, and less subjective results. In this study, a deep learning model is developed to perform multi-classification of marble slab images with six different quality types. Blur filter, 5 ✕ 5 low-pass 2D linear separable convolution filter using Gaussian kernel, and erosion filter were applied to the images for data augmentation, and a special convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture was designed and implemented. It has been observed that the data augmentation approach for marble image samples has significantly improved the accuracy of the CNN model ranging between 0.922 and 0.961.