Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation for Identification of Irrelevant Objects in a Waste Recycling Plant

In waste recycling plants, measuring the waste volume and weight at the beginning of the treatment process is key for a better management of resources. This task can be conducted by using orthophoto images, but it is necessary to remove from those images the objects, such as containers or trucks, that are not involved in the measurement process. This work proposes the application of deep learning for the semantic segmentation of those irrelevant objects. Several deep architectures are trained and compared, while three semi-supervised learning methods (PseudoLabeling, Distillation and Model Distillation) are proposed to take advantage of non-annotated images. In these experiments, the U-net++ architecture with an EfficientNetB3 backbone, trained with the set of labelled images, achieves the best overall multi Dice score of 91.23%. The application of semi-supervised learning methods further boosts the segmentation accuracy in a range between 1.31% and 2.59%, on average.