Monitoring Rubbish on Roads in Real Time by Deep Neural Network

Abstract

Monitoring and managing litter on the roadways is important not only for preserving the cleanliness and esthetic appeal of our cities but also for safeguarding the overall health and sanitary environment of citizens. With the development of artificial intelligence, it is now possible to design algorithms capable of autonomously assessing the sanitation status of roadways. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting garbage on roads as our solution to tackle the issue. The proposed model is a deep learning model with an attention mechanism introduced to detect garbage in real-time scenarios. Furthermore, the object recognition capability of the model is enhanced through transfer learning to mitigate the influence of irrelevant content during training. The refined network can detect rubbish on roads with higher efficiency than the existing models. Also, compared with other methods, it consumes less amount of data for training. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed model, with a performance boost of 7.62% over the state-of-the-art methods.