Less than 35% of recyclable waste is being actually recycled in the US, which
leads to increased soil and sea pollution and is one of the major concerns of
environmental researchers as well as the common public. At the heart of the
problem are the inefficiencies of the waste sorting process (separating paper,
plastic, metal, glass, etc.) due to the extremely complex and cluttered nature
of the waste stream. Automated waste detection has great potential to enable
more efficient, reliable, and safe waste sorting practices, but it requires
label-efficient detection of deformable objects in extremely cluttered scenes.
This challenging computer vision task currently lacks suitable datasets or
methods in the available literature. In this paper, we take a step towards
computer-aided waste detection and present the first in-the-wild
industrial-grade waste detection and segmentation dataset, ZeroWaste. This
dataset contains over 1800 fully segmented video frames collected from a real
waste sorting plant along with waste material labels for training and
evaluation of the segmentation methods, as well as over 6000 unlabeled frames
that can be further used for semi-supervised and self-supervised learning
techniques, as well as frames of the conveyor belt before and after the sorting
process, comprising a novel setup that can be used for weakly-supervised
segmentation. Our experimental results demonstrate that state-of-the-art
segmentation methods struggle to correctly detect and classify target objects
which suggests the challenging nature of our proposed real-world task of
fine-grained object detection in cluttered scenes. We believe that ZeroWaste
will catalyze research in object detection and semantic segmentation in extreme
clutter as well as applications in the recycling domain.
Our project page can be found at http://ai.bu.edu/zerowaste/