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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This chapter includes the background of the study, the hypothesis, the statement of the

problem, the scope and limitation, the significance of the study, and the definition of terms.

1.1 Background of the Study

Research shows that the detection of objects like a human eye has not been achieved with

high accuracy using cameras and cameras cannot be replaced with a human eye. Detection refers

to identification of an object or a person by training a model based on a dataset of images.

Detection of images or moving objects have been highly worked upon, and has been integrated

and used in commercial, residential and industrial environments. But, most of the strategies and

techniques have heavy limitations in the form of computational resources, lack of proper data

analysis of the measured trained data, dependence of the motion of the objects, inability to

differentiate one object from other, and also there is a concern over speed of the movement and

accuracy. Hence, there is a need to draft, apply and recognize new techniques of detection that

tackle the existing limitations.

Humans learn to recognize objects or humans by learning starting from their birth. Same

idea has been utilized by incorporating the intelligence by training into a camera using neural

networks and TensorFlow. This enables to have the same intelligence in cameras, which can be

used as an artificial eye and can be used in many areas such as surveillance, detection of

objects/things such as garbage which is really useful to collect data to plan environmental

friendly approaches to dispose the waste in a more humane way.


Currently, it is difficult to know how many garbage are in a garbage bin if you intend to

count them for data analysis. With machine learning and neural networks, it makes the job easier

by cutting the time needed for such activities and by using a machine to count the objects, thus

making it an automatic job for municipalities with the aforementioned work.

The part of the difficulty arises due to the fact that the current sensor technology is not

utilized to the full efficiency and also, due to the lack of utilization of proper data analysis

methods. The comforting fact is that with the advent of 21st century, there has been a vast

improvement in the sensor technology and arrival of the Internet of Thing (IoT) devices. In an

environment with clutter and an unspeakable mess, detection is even more challenging. One of

the difficulties presented in literature for detection is to identify a garbage through several layers.

This is a common problem for any sensor that is based on the reflection of acoustic,

optical, or electromagnetic wave off a surface. However, the issue of garbage not being

identified properly has been solved in my project. For example, fast moving garbage in real time

may cause confusion in identification or classification by computer vision techniques. At the

tracking level, objects may be stationary for no apparent reasons or they may move in any

direction spontaneously such as in a garbage recycling facility when it is on a conveyor belt. This

makes the tracking problem particularly challenging.

In order to overcome the aforementioned technical challenges, “You look only once”

(Yolo) detection system has been used not only to speed up the detection process, but also higher

accuracy has been obtained. Yolo has not been implemented with android before and I have

implemented this with android but with a lower frame rate, since GPUs are not supported on

android. One of the applications and advantages is that the android mobile devices are easily
available with everyone, and in future, this detection system can be applied for solid waste

detection to cut the time required in segregating the objects thus enabling an efficient workplace

and saving additional resources.

Meanwhile, solid waste management remains a major challenge in the Philippines

especially in urban areas like Metro Manila. Improper wastes disposal, inefficient wastes

collection and lack of disposal facilities are among the dominant concerns in the country’s solid

waste management. Unless these are addressed, the wastes generated from various sources will

continually lead to health hazards and serious environmental impacts such as ground and surface

water contamination, flooding, air pollution and spread of diseases.

Solid wastes are generated from residential, commercial, industrial and institutional

sources. Residential wastes accounts for more than half (57%) of the total solid wastes (e.g.

kitchen scraps, yard waste, paper and cardboards, glass bottles, etc.) Wastes from commercial

sources, which include commercial establishments and public/private markets, accounts for 27

percent. Wastes from institutional sources such as government offices, educational and medical

institutions accounts for about 12 percent while the remaining 4 percent is waste coming from

the industrial or manufacturing sector (NSWMC).

The country’s solid wastes typically contain more organic components than other

materials. According to NSWMC, disposed waste is dominated by biodegradable waste with 52

percent, followed by recyclable waste which accounts for 28 percent and residuals at 18 percent.

Biodegradable wastes come mostly from food waste and yard waste while recyclable wastes

include plastic packaging wastes, metals, glass, textile, leather and rubber. The significant shares

of biodegradables and recyclables indicate that composting and recycling have great potential in

reducing solid wastes.


Under RA 9003, collection, transport and disposal of solid wastes are the responsibilities

of the local government units (LGUs). At present, most LGUs administer their own collection

systems or contract out this service to private contractors. In Metro Manila, the common types of

collection vehicles are open dump trucks and compactor trucks. Nationwide, about 40 to 85

percent of the solid wastes generated is collected while in Metro Manila it is 85 percent. The

poorer areas of cities, municipalities, and rural barangays are typically unserved or under-served.

Uncollected waste ends up mostly in rivers, esteros and other water bodies, thus, polluting major

water bodies and clogging the drainage systems, which results to flooding during heavy rains

(NSWMC). It is interesting to note, however, that the 85 percent collection rate of Metro Manila

is above the average collection rate of other countries in the Philippines’ income bracket (around

69%) and among East Asia and Pacific countries (around 72%).

Through the use of the aforementioned technology above, such as the YOLO algorithm

for detecting garbage type objects, we trained this technology to detect plastic bottles as a

common class to help reduce garbage since The United Nations Joint Group of Experts on the

Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution (GESAMP), estimated that land-based sources account

for up to 80 percent of the world's marine pollution, 60 to 95 percent of the waste being plastics

debris. Through the means of recycling it or anything the app will see fit with the data amassed

by the algorithm. The dataset will be in a form of several images that will be fed to the machine

as a basis to what objects will be detected in a picture or in a sample video. To understand

clearly, by using this app, garbage in landfills, dumpsites, and municipal recovery facilities

(MRF’s) will be significantly reduced with its functions like counting the garbage amassed

throughout the day thus reducing the time if done manually. The algorithm in form of an app will

be placed on the top of a conveyor belt for instance as a scanner or deployed above as a flying
object such as a drone for instance. The scanned garbage will then be counted and registered as a

data in which a machine will sort the recyclables and the opposite for easier segregation. This

algorithm is very useful in big scale solid waste disposal factories such as in municipalities

which have the said technology in recycling and segregating the garbage through means of

conveyor belts and the like. This technology will benefit municipalities because it will lessen the

work of those tasked to count and segregate the solid waste, thus reducing the time needed for

such work and making it a hazard free work in a community.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

This innovation is meant to help municipal and city personnel quickly characterize solid

wastes and be able to quantify composition based on solid waste types. This data is vital in

designing appropriate management approaches to prevent waste from going to environment,

improve recycling rates and create innovation on converting waste to valuable products.

The current recycling process often requires recycling facilities to sort by hand.

Consumers can also be confused about the correct way to recycle materials. By using computer

vision, we can predict the category of recycling of an object based on an image of it.

Thus, this study aims to solve the following:

A. Solid waste abundance by creating different approaches based on the gathered

data by the machine.

B. Hazardous contact with waste at firsthand data collection.

C. The time needed in segregating the waste thus enabling the worker to perform

additional tasks maximizing efficiency.


1.3 Hypothesis of the Study

The hypothesis of the study are the following:

If-Then:

1.4 Significance of the Study

Much of the world's waste goes to landfill sites, which only add to the pollution problem

because they produce methane - a greenhouse gas and significant contributor to climate change.

And nowadays, technology is very rampant, making the world a technological jungle. Solid

waste in landfills are just sitting by waiting to be recovered or to be disposed of by burning, thus

producing methane gas- a harmful substance to our environment when released. How much more

does our environment needs to suffer because of these inappropriate disposal strategies?

That’s why this study is aiming to reduce the numbers of solid waste like cans, plastic

bottles, and etc.., through the use of a technology known as object detection. With this kind of

technology, we can detect waste and design environmentally friendly strategic approaches to

dispose of these wastes or to recycle them for future uses. With this technology, municipalities
will have no problem in disposing garbage through burning and etc.., because this technology

will tell you what to do with it after scanning a vicinity in a land fill with the use of your camera.

The app will then design strategic approaches like recycling for instance and others.

Taking advantage of technologies nowadays is very crucial to lessen work and to make

the workspace hazard free for workers. By using this technology, you will lessen time in

counting the number of solid wastes, be able to design approaches to dispose of the wastes

properly and safely, and others! It will cut the time dramatically for big scale disposal factories

in a half or even in a third.

1.5 Scope and Limitations

Though the study encompasses the small community of Barangay Dos in Mountain View

College, Valencia City, Bukidnon, everything needed for the experiment have been met. Most of

the limitations are just the timeframe allotted for the project and the unavailability of a suitable

GPU driver in order for the real-time detection to be precise and without any delay in a low-end

smartphone. Furthermore, the app presented is just a working prototype of the object detection

algorithm since the time to train the models used as a basis for the detection can be really slow

without a decent GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) needed for the camera to detect 30 frames per

second of a real time detection. Most important is that the study, only aims to demonstrate

firsthand this algorithm that is introduced in this study, through an app as a demonstration on

how it will work.


CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE AND STUDIES

This chapter includes the review of related literature and studies.

Review of Related Literature

In exploration, we find new techniques, new knowledge, even develop new substances,

gadgets, equipment, processes or procedures, imagination and skill is employed by the

researcher. The commodities, new devices, services, in technology are needs of man for a better

fuller life which is the concern of the research. These useful arts are the products of the

technological environment and the end-user is society in general. The fast-growing trend and

innovation in technologies today prompts researchers to conduct studies about the fast food chain

advertisement to patronize their products and modern technologies in every aspect of our daily

living. This Chapter presents a brief review of literature and studies, both local and foreign that is

related to these studies.

This part of the research presents summarized fragments of various published resources

which would present detailed facts elaboration on the study presented. Thus, on this element of

study, possible solutions are presented to the problems.


In an article written by Cruz (2011), the tragic fate of Filipinos from Northern Luzon due

to the torrential weather systems, victims of the calamity suffered greater loss as many of those

who died were buried under the mountain of trash located above the residential areas. It shows

how fast the people of Northern Luzon forget as they haven’t learned from a similar tragedy

before at the Payatas dumpsite. Obviously, with this recurring tragedy, it leaves most saying that

there is an urgent need for a better garbage disposable system that goes beyond simple sorting or

segregation of trash, but a drastic implementation of proper waste disposal involving a collective

variety of trash.

Moving on to the technology, object recognition is one of the most fascinating abilities

that humans easily possess since childhood. With a simple glance of an object, humans are able

to tell its identity or category despite of the appearance variation due to change in pose,

illumination, texture, deformation, and under occlusion. Furthermore, humans can easily

generalize from observing a set of objects to recognizing objects that have never been seen

before. For example, kids are able to generalize the concept of “chair” or “cup” after seeing just

a few examples. Nevertheless, it is a daunting task to develop vision systems that match the

cognitive capabilities of human beings, or systems that are able to tell the specific identity of an

object being observed. The main reasons can be attributed to the following factors: relative pose

of an object to a camera, lighting variation, and difficulty in generalizing across objects from a

set of exemplar images.

Central to object recognition systems are how the regularities of images, taken under

different lighting and pose conditions, are extracted and recognized. In other words, all these

algorithms adopt certain representations or models to capture these characteristics, thereby

facilitating procedures to tell their identities. In addition, the representations can be either 2D or
3D geometric models. The recognition process, either generative or discriminative, is then

carried out by matching the test image against the stored object representations or models (Yang,

2017).

Related Studies

In the International Journal of Engineering & Technology it was stated that, since the

present-day process of recycling wastes requires various recycling facilities to handle garbage

and use a combination of large filters and tools to separate out shape specific objects. Improving

this process of recycling will help in improving the efficiency of the plant by reducing the

wastage, and also in reducing the time consumed in sorting the waste. This will moreover

increase the accuracy of the classification compared to that done by hand, and hence will be

beneficial in both environmental as well as economical aspects. A stream of images is fed to the

system similar to the way it is done in waste management plants. Different objects in the image

are identified and each object is classified separately. Image processing algorithm is used to

classify the images into six different categories. By automating this process, we can easily

classify the recyclable objects by just looking at a single image (Retrieved from

http://www.sciencepubco.com/index.php/IJET ).

Before the development of deep neural networks, features were manually designed, then

followed by a classifier. Some research focused on the classification and recycling of garbage a

few years ago. For example, Sudha S et al. proposed a model for classifying objects as

biodegradable and non-biodegradable. Although the traditional object detection already has some

mature techniques, due to the morphological diversity, illumination diversity, background

diversity and other factors of the target object, the detection precision for the unfixed form
objects such as urban garbage is still a tough problem to solve. The past decade has witnessed a

rapid development of massive data and high-performance computing systems such as graphics

processing units (GPUs).Now regionbased CNN detection methods have dominated many tasks

of computer vision. It is such an exciting area that can extract the high-level features and the

hierarchical feature representations of the objects. Girshick et al. introduced a region-based CNN

(RCNN) for object detection, from 2014 to now, R-CNN, Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN, ION,

HyperNet, SDP-CRC, YOLO, G-CNN, SSD and other increasingly fast and accurate object

detection methods have emerged. There is very little research on garbage detection at home and

abroad now. In the first, Mittal proposed a GarbNet network to complete the classification of

garbage and non-spam images, achieving a mean accuracy of 87.69% on the GINI dataset. In

later years, they developed GoogLeNet as its classification architecture, which was similar to

OverFeat model, to detect the target objects such as cigarette butts and leaves from a height of

several meters. (“Autonomous garbage detection for intelligent urban management”, 2018)

Retrieved from https://www.matec-conferences.org/articles.com


CHAPTER THREE

RESEARCH METHOD AND PROCEDURE

This chapter deals with the procedures and methods that were used in the study. This

briefly discusses the research design, data gathering procedure and the construction of the model.

Research Design

This study entitled “” is an applied research serving as a modern approach to deter

additional garbage quantity in municipalities which have limited access to sophisticated garbage

disposal materials. It’s based on the YOLO (You only look once) framework. It’s designed to

identify the garbage on a landfill based on a set of images in a pre-trained model such as an app.

As Calmorin (2010) stated, applied research is the type of research that involves seeking new

applications of the scientific knowledge to the solution of a problem such as the development of

a new system, procedure or a device, or new method in order to solve a problem. In this research,

the problem is identified then a new method is applied to solve the problem in the form of

modern technology.

On the other hand, experimental research was conducted in the study.

The experimental method was employed in this study for it aims to determine the

accuracy of detecting the objects based on a given dataset of images.

Data Gathering Procedure

Experimentation was the main tool used to gather data. It was conducted between the

three variables, namely: Plastic Bottle, Can, Metal, the independent variables, and the efficacy
and accuracy of the app in detecting the objects as the dependent variable. The researchers

recorded and evaluated the data to examine that the app has worked flawlessly.

On the data gathering procedure, laboratory experimentation was replaced by field testing

of the prototype that we created. The researchers used this data gathering procedure because the

application was trained to detect the three aforementioned classes.

In gathering the data, the researchers used all available resources to study the fail to gain

ratios for the accuracy in detecting the objects. These sources are important because they contain

essential info about the study.

Preparation of the Output

The procedures for the production of the output followed the phase of planning,

execution and experimentation.

The accuracy levels that were obtained in the application enabled us to plan for further

deployment in municipal factories to serve as a garbage data analytics tool.

After the planning the construction of the application the things needed were:

a. A good internet connection

b. A suitable graphics driver for training the dataset faster than average speeds

c. And painstaking effort!

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