Enhancing biodegradable waste management in Mauritius through real-time computer vision-based sorting

Abstract

Mauritius faces a significant waste management challenge due to the indiscriminate mixing of biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste. This practice hinders proper recycling and composting efforts, contributing to environmental pollution and resource depletion. This research proposes a computer vision-based system for real-time classification of waste into biodegradable and non-biodegradable categories. Transfer learning approach based on deep learning models, specifically DenseNet121, MobileNet, InceptionV3, VGG16 and VGG19 were evaluated with two different classifiers, the K-nearest neighbors (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM). Our experiments demonstrate that the MobileNet paired with SVM achieves a classification accuracy of 97% for detection in realtime. Compared to other studies, our results demonstrate better performance and realtime classification capabilities through the implementation of a prototype, facilitating automatic sorting of waste.