Waste sorting using machine vision

Waste sorting using machine vision

Author Name : Arjun Jayan, John Prince, Krishnaprasad P, Sidharth S Nair, Anand Rajagopal

ABSTRACT: Waste management is a growing problem everywhere around the world. Waste such as plastics, electronic wastes and many other recyclable items usually end up in landfills polluting soil and groundwater. Recycling is the best way to manage the waste menace but it is also a tedious process. Handling large amount of waste generated, requires assistance of advanced technology. Wastes may also contain harmful chemicals or toxic metals such as lead, mercury etc and therefore employing humans in waste sorting can affect the health of workers. The solution to this problem is to use advanced machines for doing jobs which are risky for humans. Machine vision technology can be used to recognize most of the objects in the waste stream which moves on a conveyor and it can be sorted based on the detection. These waste sorting machines can operate round the clock. Thus the speed and capacity of waste processing is improved. A miniature working model of a waste sorting machine is fabricated.