Improving the Event-Based Classification Accuracy in Pit-Drilling Operations: An Application by Neural Networks and Median Filtering of the Acceleration Input Signal Data

Forestry is a complex economic sector which is relying on resource and process monitoring data. Most of the forest operations such as planting and harvesting are supported by the use of tools and machines, and their monitoring has been traditionally done by the use of pen-and-paper time studies. Nevertheless, modern data collection and analysis methods involving different kinds of platforms and machine learning techniques have been studied lately with the aim of easing the data management process. By their outcomes, improvements are still needed to reach a close to 100% activity recognition, which may depend on several factors such as the type of monitored process and the characteristics of the signals used as inputs. In this paper, we test, thought a case study on mechanized pit-drilling operations, the potential of digital signal processing techniques combined with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in improving the event-based classification accuracy in the time domain. Signal processing was implemented by the means of median filtering of triaxial accelerometer data (window sizes of 3, 5, and up to 21 observations collected at 1 Hz) while the ANNs were subjected to the regularization hyperparameter’s tunning. An acceleration signal processed by a median filter with a window size of 3 observations and fed into an ANN set to learn and generalize by a regularization parameter of α = 0.01 has been found to be the best strategy in improving the event-based classification accuracy (improvements of 1% to 8% in classification accuracy depending on the type of event in question). Improvement of classification accuracy by signal filtering and ANN tuning may depend largely on the type of monitored process and its outcomes in terms of event duration; therefore, other monitoring applications may need particular designs of signal processing and ANN tuning.