This eighth quarterly technical report discusses the progress made on a machine vision technique for determining coal content and preparations for Year-3 system deployment. Classification maps for coal have been generated and shown to two coal-mining executives. An application for licensing high-speed hyperspectral data analysis software from the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been made. Both Western Energy and Stillwater Mining Company have offered platforms for Year-3 deployment. Barretts Minerals has expressed renewed interest in using Resonon's machine vision system for identifying dolomite in their talc ore and have agreed to provide samples to the Montana Tech team.

This twelfth quarterly technical report discusses work on classification algorithms and an improved lighting system. Measurements on core in the Stillwater Mine core room showed that false positive sulfide classifications occurred at breaks in the core and there were also problems with camera saturation due to glints from crystal facets within the core. To reduce false positives due to noisy data, a wavelet transform smoothing program was explored. Results indicate classifications improve only marginally with smoothed data for spectral angle mapping techniques. A new lighting technique was developed to decrease saturation due to glints from facets within the core samples. This appears to have decreased the glints and it has the added benefit of greatly decreasing false positives near the breaks in the core.