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Shearer is an essential equipment in mechanized coal mining process. Roof cutting often turns up for shearer during working process, leading to extra vibration on shearer and reducing its service life. Coal and rock interface recognition is a fundamental technical way for shearer to avoid continuous roof cutting. In this paper, an effective method for coal and rock interface is proposed and it is mainly based on the cutting loads on shearer drum in three different kinds of working states. The constitutions of cutting force on shearer drum are analyzed under conditions of different proportions of rock thickness in the cutting range and then model for calculation of cutting force in the coal–rock mixed seam are proposed which is a function of rock proportion in the cutting range. To verify the model, hard roof with different material strengths and different interfaces are established with the numerical method and rock proportions in the cutting range are derived based on the mentioned method. In terms of the situations where rock material properties are close to coal and the results are obtained with lower accuracy, enlarging the difference of rock proportions in the second and third states is proposed and the relations between the recognition accuracy and the differences of rock proportions in different states are explored as well. The results show that the estimation method works well with qualititative analysis of coal and roof interface even if coal and rock material properties are various and not able to be known in advance. In addition, the adjustment height of shearer drum is the important factors highly related with the estimation accuracy and it would be helpful for accuracy improvement in conditions where the material properties of coal and roof are closer to each other or larger roof cutting thickness happens in coal mining. The method provides the possibility for qualititative analysis of coal and roof interface with easy accessibility and wide adaptability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]