Automatic Classification and Identification of Road Garbage Images and Evaluation of Environmental Health Based on UNet++

Abstract

As Covid-19 plagues the world, a clean environment helps to control the factors and risks that threaten health, and curb the spread of the epidemic. However, the quality evaluation of environmental health faces some problems and challenges in actual management and practice. Firstly, the classification, identification, and quantification of road garbage are mainly done manually, because of the diversity of road garbage, as well as their sharp differences in geometry, color, and texture. Secondly, it is labor-intensive to manually manage the large operation areas on the wide urban roads. Thirdly, the accuracy of statistical indices is affected by the time-varying road environment, making the quality evaluation of environmental health untimely and inaccurate. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an intelligent image classification and evaluation method for urban environmental health. Specifically, an environmental garbage recognition and semantic segmentation approach was designed based on UNet++, and combined with the vehicle-mounted machine vision system to automatically identify the typical targets among the road waste control indices. Next, an image attention quantitative evaluation method was developed based on the eye tracking analyzer, and the quantified attention was fused with the statistical features for road garbage classification, forming an attention-based evaluation method for environmental quality. The proposed approach supports the automatic recognition and semantic segmentation of the garbage on urban roads, and realizes the identification of complex targets in different scenes through transfer learning. In addition, the attention-based evaluation method for environmental quality provides environmental management departments with visual basis for quantitative decision-making.