FConvNet: Leveraging Fused Convolution for Household Garbage Classification

Abstract

Confronted with the fast social development, the speed of garbage generation has increased. Therefore, from every aspect, especially staying green and healthy, it is urgent and vital to ensure accurate and stable garbage classification. In the field of garbage classification, household garbage has a large volume and the classification process still requires manual intervention. Besides, most of the current studies focus on industrial waste and medical waste, while the existing studies on household garbage are not effective enough. Furthermore, these studies are mostly trained and validated in self-built datasets, making the experimental results insufficiently representative and severely limiting the development of research. Aiming to facilitate the study of household garbage classification, this paper proposes a simple yet effective network model (FConvNet) to improve classification performance. In this paper, an effective convolution block with fused convolution is designed to enhance the potential correlation of the features in the spatial dimension, and then a lightweight symmetric structure is constructed to infer more information about the feature representation. The experiments on public datasets have justified the effectiveness of FConvNet with accuracy rates of 95%, 95% and 97%, achieving better performance on public datasets compared to baselines. Additionally, an online system based on the WeChat mini program framework is designed to provide convenient household garbage classification services and enable the collection of uploaded images to perform model optimizations.