Detecting the overfilled status of domestic and commercial bins using computer vision

As the amount of waste being produced globally is increasing, there is a need for more efficient waste management solutions to accommodate this expansion. The first step in waste management is the collection of bins or containers. Each bin truck in a fleet is assigned a collection route. As the bin trucks have a finite amount of storage for waste, accepting overfilled bins may result in filling this storage before the end of the collection route. This creates inefficiencies as a second bin truck is needed to finish the collection route if the original becomes full. Currently, the recording and tracking of overfilled bins is a manual process, requiring the bin truck operator to undertake this task, resulting in longer collection route durations. To create a more efficient and automated process, computer vision methods are considered for the task of detecting the bin status. Video footage from a commercial collection route for two bin types, automated side loader (ASL) and front-end loader (FEL), was utilized to create appropriate computer vision datasets for the task of fully supervised object detection and instance segmentation. Selected state-of-the-art object detection and instance segmentation algorithms were used to investigate their performances on this proprietary dataset. A mean average precision (mAP) score of 0.8 or greater was achieved with each model, reflecting the effectiveness of using computer vision as a tool to automate the process of recording overfilled bins.