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A weakly supervised approach for recycling code recognition

delete2023-04-01
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PRE
AI
L
Lorenzo Pellegrini *
D
Davide Maltoni
G
Gabriele Graffieti
V
Vincenzo Lomonaco
L
Lisa Mazzini
DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2022.119282delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Waste sorting at the household level is a virtuous process that can greatly increase material recycling and boost the circular economy. To this purpose, waste must be differentiated by material (e.g., PVC, Polyethylene, Paper, Glass, Aluminum, etc.), a task that can be simplified by printing a recycling code on the product case. Unfortunately, the large number of recycling codes printed on products makes this process unfriendly for many users. In this work, we propose a vision-based mobile application to support users in recognizing recycling codes for proper waste sorting. The proposed system combines a dual-head CNN with an image processing pipeline (based on domain knowledge) in order to improve: (i) the reliability of symbol detection/classification and (ii) the weakly-supervised labeling of new samples during iterative training. Our experimental results prove the feasibility of developing effective applications with minimum effort in terms of data collection and labeling, which is one of the main obstacles to successfully applying deep-learning techniques to real-world problems.
Keywords:
Recycling code recognition
Recycling symbols recognition
Waste recognition
Weakly supervised classification

Journal

Expert Systems with Applications cover
Expert Systems with Applications
IF:
7.5
Papers:
2.9W
Citations:
10.2W

Organization

U
University of Pisa
Scholars:
3.1W
Papers: 2.4W
Citations: 2.4W
U
University of Bologna
Scholars:
4.5W
Papers: 3.8W
Citations: 4.1W