Waste Detection System Based on Data Augmentation and YOLO_EC

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Mar 31;23(7):3646. doi: 10.3390/s23073646.

Abstract

The problem of waste classification has been a major concern for both the government and society, and whether waste can be effectively classified will affect the sustainable development of human society. To perform fast and efficient detection of waste targets in the sorting process, this paper proposes a data augmentation + YOLO_EC waste detection system. First of all, because of the current shortage of multi-objective waste classification datasets, the heavy workload of human data collection, and the limited improvement of data features by traditional data augmentation methods, DCGAN (deep convolution generative adversarial networks) was optimized by improving the loss function, and an image-generation model was established to realize the generation of multi-objective waste images; secondly, with YOLOv4 (You Only Look Once version 4) as the basic model, EfficientNet is used as the backbone feature extraction network to realize the light weight of the algorithm, and at the same time, the CA (coordinate attention) attention mechanism is introduced to reconstruct the MBConv module to filter out high-quality information and enhance the feature extraction ability of the model. Experimental results show that on the HPU_WASTE dataset, the proposed model outperforms other models in both data augmentation and waste detection.

Keywords: DCGAN; YOLOv4; data augmentation; target detection; waste classification.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.