Economic and social progress in the Republic of Korea resulted in an increased standard of living, which subsequently produced more waste. The Korean government implemented a volume-based trash disposal system that may modify waste disposal characteristics to handle vast volumes of waste efficiently. However, the inconvenience of having to purchase standard garbage bags on one's own led to passive participation by citizens and instances of illegally dumping waste in non-standard plastic bags. As a result, there is a need for the development of automatic detection and reporting of illegal acts of garbage dumping. To achieve this, we suggest a system for tracking unlawful rubbish disposal that is based on deep neural networks. The proposed monitoring approach obtains the articulation points (joints) of a dumper through OpenPose and identifies the type of garbage bag through the object detection model, You Only Look Once (YOLO), to determine the distance of the dumper's wrist to the garbage bag and decide whether it is illegal dumping. Additionally, we introduced a method of tracking the IDs issued to the waste bags using the multi-object tracking (MOT) model to reduce the false detection of illegal dumping. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed illegal dumping monitoring system, we compared it with the other systems based on behavior recognition. As a result, it was validated that the suggested approach had a higher degree of accuracy and a lower percentage of false alarms, making it useful for a variety of upcoming applications.
Keywords: articular point; garbage bag; multi-object tracking; object detection; waste disposal.