The automatic identification of rock type in the field would aid geological surveying, education, and automatic mapping. Deep learning is receiving significant research attention for pattern recognition and machine learning. Its application here has effectively identified rock types from images captured in the field. This paper proposes an accurate approach for identifying rock types in the field based on image analysis using deep convolutional neural networks. The proposed approach can identify six common rock types with an overall classification accuracy of 97.96%, thus outperforming other established deep-learning models and a linear model. The results show that the proposed approach based on deep learning represents an improvement in intelligent rock-type identification and solves several difficulties facing the automated identification of rock types in the field.

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High-resolution geological mapping is an important supporting condition for mineral and energy exploration. However, high-resolution geological mapping work still faces many problems. At present, high-resolution geological mapping is still generated by expert interpretation of survey lines, compasses, and field data. The work in the field is constrained by the weather, terrain, and personnel, and the working methods need to be improved. This paper proposes a new method for high-resolution mapping using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and deep learning algorithms. This method uses the UAV to collect high-resolution remote sensing images, cooperates with some groundwork to anchor the lithology, and then completes most of the mapping work on high-resolution remote sensing images. This method transfers a large amount of field work into the room and provides an automatic mapping process based on the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering-Convolutional Neural Network (SLIC-CNN) algorithm. It uses the convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the image content and confirms the lithologic distribution, the simple linear iterative cluster (SLIC) algorithm can be used to outline the boundary of the rock mass and determine the contact interface of the rock mass, and the mode and expert decision method is used to clarify the results of the fusion and mapping. The mapping method was applied to the Taili waterfront in Xingcheng City, Liaoning Province, China. In this study, the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of the mapping method was 0.937. The Kappa test result was k = 0.8523, and a high-resolution geological map was obtained.