Abstract: Traditional rock slice image classification relies on a large number of manually labeled image samples, which is subject to the experience and ability of the labelers. This practice limits the scalability of classification enhancement as increasing unlabeled rock slice image samples does not contribute effectively. In order to achieve effective utilization of unlabeled data information, the hierarchy consistency mean teacher (HCMT) model adds a hierarchy consistency regularization term to the unsupervised loss of the mean teacher (MT) model to constrain the hierarchical structure of the teacher-student model. Ablation experiments and comparative analyses reveal that the introduction of hierarchy consistency regularization method improves the classification performance of the MT model by using the effective information of unlabeled data. As a result, the HCMT model achieves comparable classification capability in both half-labeled and fully labeled dataset. The experiments show the potential of the semi-supervised learning model to improve the classification ability of the model by using a large number of unlabeled rock slice image data.

Key words: semi-supervised learning, mean teacher (MT) model, classification of rock slice images, hierarchy consistency method