1. State Key Laboratory of Geomechanics and Geotechnical Engineering Safety, Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, China
2. School of Engineering Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
hzwei@whrsm.ac.cn
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Received
Accepted
Published Online
2025-08-25
2025-11-02
2026-03-05
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Abstract
Instant access to the particle size characteristics of sandstone is of great importance to improve the efficiency and safety of deep in situ mining. It is highly challenging to quantify the particle size under non-destructive conditions. In this research, six distance-dependent texture features were further extracted via the gray-scale level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) analysis. The gray-scale distribution reveals that the extremely reflective pixels are prevalent in the gray-scale images of the sandstone, accounting for an average of 0.06% of each image. The image preprocessing can effectively enhance the dynamic range, the global contrast, and the most dominant gray-scale values. Depending on the variation pattern with the distance, all six features were divided into scale-sensitive features and scale-invariant features. A prediction model for the median particle size of sandstone based on the texture feature scale was finally developed and validated. The results indicate entropy exhibits the best prediction performance with a maximum relative error of 15.8%. These achievements could provide a theoretical basis and an effective solution for predicting the physical and mechanical properties of the sandstone by texture features.
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