Mineral Prospectivity Mapping Based on a Lightweight Two-Dimensional Fully Convolutional Neural Network: A Case Study of the Gold Deposits in the Xiong’ershan Area, Henan Province, China

With the development of geological data analysis and big data technology, intelligent mineral prospectivity mapping (MPM) has become a key direction in the integration of geoscience and artificial intelligence, showing promising applications in the identification and evaluation of strategic mineral resources such as gold. To address the limitations of conventional methods—including insufficient training samples, complex model structures, and weak capability in recognizing anomalous zones—this study proposes an improved convolutional neural network (CNN) approach for mineral prediction. A lightweight, modular CNN structure with repeatable stacking is designed to reduce computational cost while enhancing model robustness and generalization. In addition, a dynamic learning rate scheduling strategy is adopted to optimize the training process, significantly improving convergence speed and training stability. Furthermore, high-probability prediction samples and low-probability background samples are combined to form a new training dataset for regional prospectivity evaluation, yielding a high area under the curve (AUC) score. The method is applied and validated in the Xiong’ershan region, and the predicted high-potential zones account for 30% of the study area and contain 81.4% of the known gold deposits. These results demonstrate the method’s effectiveness in mineral information extraction and blind-area targeting, offering a new approach for mineral prospectivity mapping.