SegNet‐VOLO model for classifying microplastic contaminants in water bodies

In recent times, microplastics (MPs) have emerged as notable contaminants within several environments, especially in water bodies. The characterization and description of MPs necessitate extensive and laborious analytical methods, making this part of MPs research an essential issue. In this research, SegNet‐Vision Outlooker (VOLO), a computer vision and deep learning (DL)‐based model, is proposed for detecting and classifying MPs present in a water environment. This research model includes step‐by‐step processes such as data collection, preprocessing, filtering and enhancement, augmentation, segmentation, feature extraction, and classification for detecting MPs. The key objective of this research model is to improve the classification accuracy in detecting MPs and to validate the model's effectiveness in handling holographic images. The Holographic Image MPs dataset is collected and used to evaluate the model. In preprocessing, image rescaling is performed to match the proposed model's input resolution as 224 × 224. After rescaling, the images are applied to remove noise using a bilateral filtering technique. The contrast‐limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) method is applied to enhance the image with better contrast and brightness, which helps the model to segment and classify the images accurately. The enhanced images are applied to the SegNet model for segmentation, which segmented the images according to the MP classes. Based on the segmented images, the VOLO‐D1 model extracted the features and classified the images to detect the MPs present in the images. The SegNet‐VOLO model attained 97.70% detection rate, 98.26% accuracy, 98.13% F1‐score, and 98.62% precision. These performances are compared with the various existing models discussed in the review, where the research model outperformed all the models with better performances.