The use of Artificial Intelligence for Automatic Waste Segregation in the Garbage Recycling Process

Abstract

The problem of recycling secondary raw materials remains unresolved, despite many years of work on this issue. Among the many obstacles that arise is also the difficulty of sorting individual waste fractions. To facilitate this task and help solve this problem, modern computer vision and artificial intelligence techniques can be used. In our work, we propose constructing an intelligent garbage bin containing a camera and a microcomputer along with software that uses these techniques to sort waste. The role of the software is to recognize the type of waste and assign it to one of five main categories: paper, plastic, metal, glass and cardboard. The proposed method uses image recognition techniques with a convolutional neural network. The results confirm that using artificial intelligence methods significantly helps in sorting waste. The proposed solution can be used in homes and public places such as parks, cinemas or playgrounds.