"Total amount of garbage in the world is around 3.7m tones, by 2025 this will rise to more than 6.1m tones", explains Gaurav Mittal. "Maintaining a clean and hygienic civic environment is an indispensable yet formidable task, especially in developing countries." (paper)
Gaurav Mittal and his classmates at IIT Ropar in India are the creators of the garbage recognition app. Photographs taken through the Spot Garbage app are submitted to the municipality for review. AI to detect segment and geotag garbage. It then uploads this information to the cloud and provide the authorities with the most efficient route for garbage collection. "With the aim of engaging citizens to track and report on their neighborhoods, this paper presents a novel smartphone app, called SpotGarbage, which detects and coarsely segments garbage regions in a user-clicked geo-tagged image. The app utilizes the proposed deep architecture of fully convolutional networks for detecting garbage in images. The model has been trained on a newly introduced Garbage In Images (GINI) dataset, achieving a mean accuracy of 87.69%. The paper also proposes optimizations in the network architecture resulting in a reduction of 87.9% in memory usage and 96.8% in prediction time with no loss in accuracy, facilitating its usage in resource constrained smartphones" (paper) This project won a prize at the Microsoft challenge in India last year.
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The model has achieved a mean accuracy of 87.69%.