MineBL: A Battery-Free Localization Scheme with Binocular Camera for Coal Mine

Accurate localization in underground coal mining is a challenging technology in coal mine safety production. This paper proposes a low-cost battery-free localization scheme based on depth images, called MineBL. The main idea is to utilize the battery-free low-cost reflective balls as position nodes and realize underground target localization with a series of algorithms. In particular, the paper designs a data enhancement strategy based on small-target reorganization to increase the identification accuracy of tiny position nodes. Moreover, a novel ranging algorithm based on multi-filter cooperative denoising has been proposed, and an optimized weighted centroid location algorithm based on multilateral location errors has been designed to minimize underground localization errors. Many experiments in the indoor laboratories and the underground coal mine laboratories have been conducted, and the experimental results have verified that MineBL has good localization performances, with localization errors less than 30 cm in 95% of cases. Therefore, MineBL has great potential to provide a low-cost and effective solution for precise target localization in complex underground environments.