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Anyone Using Artificial Intelligence With Their Gold Detectors?


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45 minutes ago, Chase Goldman said:

Immense?  Um, ok. :rolleyes:

Not sure what you mean by silent threshold, but OK.

Induction-based detecting tech has plateaued.  But I can't fault folks for wanting to squeeze more blood out of a rock.  More power to you and your unbridled optimism and enthusiasm.  Would be more than happy to be proven wrong.

Meanwhile I'll focus most of my energy into site identification and using tech and research to find sites likely to produce and methods to thoroughly exploit them for coverage.  Much greater return on investment than micro incremental improvements in an applied principle that has been fundamentally unchanged for 100 plus years despite the latest advancements that have delivered incremental improvements through SMF and signal processing.

Meant stable threshold not silent. 

Almost all of the tech in a PI detector is there to separate of signal from noise. When you run your detector at anything besides the highest sensitivity settings (so on a GPZ, that'd be Sens 20, all smoothing off, Normal - on a GPX 5000, that'd be Sharp timing, gain 20, stab 0), you are sacrificing depth for stability. Every setting under those max settings is there to help filter out ground and EMI so you can actually distinguish real targets. Even those max settings have some amount of ground and EMI mitigation built in. 

If you can run balls to the wall settings where you are and still not ever be affected by ground noise or EMI, have zero false targets, well I would love to be there! But I suspect that you do not run your GPZ or GPX full-bore all the time, and therefore you are missing targets. I think there is a lot of blood still to squeeze out. 

The QED is one detector that has a no GB mode - not aware of any others - and it is unusable in that mode in even marginally mineralised ground.

Of course, the detector manufacturers and engineers are the ones who will improve the tech. The prospectors are doing what you want to be doing - prospecting.

Machine learning can do things today that only the most visionary humans dreamt of in the past. There's massive potential for a new era that dwarfs previous technological generations in terms of scope and capability. It's hard to overstate the potential, but very easy to dismiss it as incremental. It can and should be applied to detector technology and will likely have a massive impact.

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5 hours ago, BrokeInBendigo said:

The QED is one detector that has a no GB mode - not aware of any others - and it is unusable in that mode in even marginally mineralised ground.

While I've never owned any model of GPX below the 4500 both my 4500 and 5000 can turn the Ground Balance off.

From the GPX 5000 manual

Ground Balance (GB) Type
Ground Balance Type has three settings:
Normal, Specific, and GB Off. Normal is the
preferred setting for most soil types. Specific
Ground Balance is designed to be used in
very hot ground, and is especially useful with
Monoloop coils. GB Off switches the ground
balance circuit off for maximum depth in very
mild soils, sand etc.

(Ground Balance) Off
In very benign soils, such as non-mineralised loam or sand,
there can be very little and sometimes no ground effect.
These areas are quite rare but are identified when your
ground balance doesn't appear to be doing anything. By
switching the GB Type to Off you can achieve improved
depth and sensitivity.
This feature will most likely be used by beach hunters,
or inland treasure/relic seekers, as it is extremely rare to
encounter a spot in the gold field where Ground Balance
is not required.

Procedure:
Raise the coil off the ground, away from metal objects,
and switch to GB Off. After the tone is heard you can
commence detecting.
Note: The Iron Reject function (p. 74) will provide the best
results when using GB Type General.

I've found GB off works fine on my GPX's in a good range of soils around here and has crazy depth on a coin, doesn't work too well around prospecting areas here even though they're mild and signals on every hot rock possible but as a coin detector it can be used with GB off.  I experimented with the QED with GB off (mode 11), makes a huge difference to the depth of the detector, makes it quite good, almost GPX like for depth and worked on the same sort of areas the GPX works with GB off. 

The GPX 5000 also has coin and relic timing, it's as close as you can get to GB Off without going in and turning GB off, it's crap for gold prospecting though even in very mild gold areas as it has very reduced sensitivity to small gold.

From the Manual

Coin/Relic
Coin/Relic is designed for use in lightly mineralised soils
including many beaches. It offers maximum detection depth
on a range of target sizes, significantly greater than any other
timings. However, if the ground is any more than lightly
mineralised, the detector may not ground balance. Coin/
Relic should work very well in most common parks, ovals, and
old home sites, so is the preferred timing when using your
detector for coins, jewellery and relics. On ocean beaches
containing significant quantities of black sand, better results
may be had by using Normal, or Salt/Gold (GPX 5000).

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14 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

Like I said previously, we are not going to see a step change in capability without moving away from Induction-based technology.  It's pretty much tapped out and all we are doing is polishing a cannonball while adding bells and whistles to it.

Chase, What if they keep induction based technology, add a full color screen and assign a color to each type of metal. That would give a person more of an idea of what they have come across.

Since I am still new to detecting I have often wondered about this, and would like to know if it is possible to do such a thing. I could see cases where silver and gold would show up at the same time, or copper and iron together. If the display would show the colors of each item then that would be the next step in detecting for me and a lot of others.

Just a thought.

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17 hours ago, GotAU? said:

As for accurately mapping where a detector coil has been, here’s a paper describing using a PDA and a camera to precisely map out the coil position and it creates a low resolution outline image of the target as the coil scans it. The primary use for the system was intended for UXO detecting, but it may be useful for relict detecting as well.  They even use the system for object recognition, but it would be useful for small targets though.  As for hardware, I’d think any new smartphone has the capability to do this, as the researchers who made the system were using a basic PDA and camera to do it.

Thanks for the paper! 

11 hours ago, BrokeInBendigo said:

You're most welcome. I've a keen interest in this, so please excuse if I go on a bit long about this stuff.

Thank you all of that post. There was so much in it. I'm new to everything to do with detecting so all of it was extremely helpful. What are your ideas on other methods of acquiring the signal? Is multi frequency analysis something that could be used?

20 hours ago, Chase Goldman said:

To do this accurately you need to move away from GPS as it can only be accurate at best to within 6 feet.  Fractions of an inch matter in coil coverage.  I'm thinking a portable local solution.  Perhaps consisting of laser tracking of a coil target monitored and recorded with precise positioning data coupled/integrated with visual information using a drone or drones hovering over the search area.  Think golf ball flight tracking and virtual first down marker lines across the video display of a football field.

I was thinking an approach to this could be to use a similar approach to photogrammetry or biometrics. Only using image and no location data. The phone/drone/AR glasses would map key points of each image and an AI detects the location of the coil against the image.

I'm doubtful if this could work right now, but I 100% think it will sometime in the future. 

In regards to you mentioning that induction is maxed out, are there any new alternatives? Maybe technologies that pick up so much that they're practically impossible to turn into a human interpretable audio signal, but could all be feed into some kind of neural network? Is multifrequency something in this direction? 

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12 hours ago, phrunt said:

While I've never owned any model of GPX below the 4500 both my 4500 and 5000 can turn the Ground Balance off.

Aye, very rarely used a GPX in ground tracking (other than the 6K) same with the GPZ 7000. Manuals been the go, auto tracking probably is part of the evolution of our detectors to AI, Geosense probably another part, hope I`m around to see AI compete with what we have between the ears.

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Yea, I don't think I've ever used tracking on the 4500, but in saying that I'm the person least likely to need to use it, I was always on fixed and manual is my go-to on the 7000.  The more detector manufacturers can improve ground balance the better depth the users will get, I think people in hotter soils would get a surprise the depth difference between having any ground balance and ground balance disabled.  For example, the GPX 5000 with GB completely turned off, not fixed, off completely gives so much more depth than the same detector with Ground balance enabled and balanced in mild soils where the detector gets no reaction from the soil with it either on or off.    The QED was the same, in any mode other than Mode 11 (GB Disabled) in mild soils even with a perfectly balanced detector the depth is killed just by enabling the ground balance circuit.  I guess in a way Geosense is working towards this, I would still like a way to disable it on the 6000 just to see how it works for me.

In some of my prospecting areas I can run both the QED and GPX 4500/5000 with ground balance completely disabled and they remained perfectly balanced, no reaction from the ground at all, the down side is by disabling it the hot rocks really come alive so the area has to be selected carefully to take advantage of it.

The better manufacturers can improve the detectors ground balance the better the depth will be and if they can use some sort of AI technology to do this or just faster processing or whatever it will be the next big improvement in PI's.  I always thought that if I used ground balance and balanced the detector I'd get the same depth as if I had ground balance turned off entirely in very mild soil, and this is simply not correct.    My mild soils are the perfect example of this as even though I can run with no ground balance at all, just by enabling it I am hindering depth.

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2 hours ago, Norvic said:

Aye, very rarely used a GPX in ground tracking (other than the 6K) same with the GPZ 7000. Manuals been the go, auto tracking probably is part of the evolution of our detectors to AI, Geosense probably another part, hope I`m around to see AI compete with what we have between the ears.

Simon’s referring to no ground balance at all - not fixed/manual GB - which is a setting I’d wager nobody uses on Australian goldfields. 

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