The classification of iron ore rock plays a crucial role in assisting the mine to develop scientifically sound mining strategies. Given the limitations of traditional manual identification and chemical techniques in terms of cost and detection time, it is crucial to develop an economical, high-precision, and efficient classification method for iron ore rocks. This paper takes an iron mine in Anshan as the research center and aims to establish an iron ore rock classification model by combining the improved extreme learning machine (ELM) with near-infrared spectra (NIRS). The NIRS of iron ore rock is denoised and feature extracted using the Savitzky–Golay filter and competitive adaptive reweighted sampling (CARS) methods, respectively. In this paper, we propose the IAdaBoost algorithm by introducing the sample similarity relationship into the weight-updating strategy of the AdaBoost integration algorithm. The weighted extreme learning machine (WELM) is adopted as the base learner for the IAdaBoost algorithm. Furthermore, we employ a multi-strategy improved gray wolf optimization (IGWO) algorithm to optimize the learning rate and the number of integrated base learners in the IAdaBoost algorithm. Consequently, we propose the IGWO-IAdaBoost-WELM model. Compared to other machine learning models, our proposed model performs better and can classify iron ore rocks consistently and efficiently. Meanwhile, we also used the model to invert the remote sensing images of the iron ore mining area, and the results show that the model can achieve fast, efficient, and large-scale iron ore rock classification, which provides an important reference for mining.