DeepWaste: Applying Deep Learning to Waste Classification for a Sustainable Planet
This addresses waste misclassification for general users to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it is incremental as it applies existing deep learning methods to a new application.
The paper tackles the problem of inaccurate waste disposal by developing DeepWaste, a mobile app that uses deep learning to classify waste into trash, recycling, and compost, achieving an average precision of 0.881 on test data.
Accurate waste disposal, at the point of disposal, is crucial to fighting climate change. When materials that could be recycled or composted get diverted into landfills, they cause the emission of potent greenhouse gases such as methane. Current attempts to reduce erroneous waste disposal are expensive, inaccurate, and confusing. In this work, we propose DeepWaste, an easy-to-use mobile app, that utilizes highly optimized deep learning techniques to provide users instantaneous waste classification into trash, recycling, and compost. We experiment with several convolution neural network architectures to detect and classify waste items. Our best model, a deep learning residual neural network with 50 layers, achieves an average precision of 0.881 on the test set. We demonstrate the performance and efficiency of our app on a set of real-world images.