Waste image classification based on transfer learning and convolutional neural network

Abstract

The rapid economic and social development has led to a rapid increase in the output of domestic waste. How to realize waste classification through intelligent methods has become a key factor for human beings to achieve sustainable development. Traditional waste classification technology has low efficiency and low accuracy. To improve the efficiency and accuracy of waste classification processing, this paper proposes a DenseNet169 waste image classification model based on transfer learning. Because of the disadvantages of the existing public waste dataset, such as uneven distribution of data, single background, obvious features, and small sample size of the waste image, the waste image dataset NWNU-TRASH is constructed. The dataset has the advantages of balanced distribution, high diversity, and rich background, which is more in line with real needs. 70% of the dataset is used as the training set and 30% as the test set. Based on the deep learning network DenseNet169 pre-trained model, we can form a DenseNet169 model suitable for this experimental dataset. The experimental results show that the accuracy of classification is over 82% in the DenseNet169 model after the transfer learning, which is better than other image classification algorithms.

Keywords: Deep learning; DenseNet; Image recognition; Recyclable waste classification; Transfer learning.