Municipal solid waste segregation with CNN

Pollution from municipal solid waste has been a problem in Thailand for a long time. People generate waste in every minute. Ineffective waste segregation does increase difficulties in solid waste management. The Pollution Control Department of Thailand provides segregation guideline for municipal solid waste. Household wastes should be separated into four types-general waste, compostable waste, recyclable waste and hazardous waste. This paper explored performance of CNN-based waste-type classifiers (VGG-16, ResNet-50, MobileNet V2 and DenseNet-121) in classifying waste types of 9,200 municipal solid waste images. Waste type can be identified directly from waste-type classifier or derived from waste-item class. Derived classifiers outperformed their corresponding direct classifiers in the experiment. The highest waste-type classification accuracy was 94.86% from the derived ResNet-50 classifier.