Image Classification of Parcel Boxes under the Underground Logistics System Using CNN MobileNet

Abstract

Despite various economic crisis situations around the world, the courier and delivery service market continues to be revitalized. The parcel shipping volume in Korea is currently 3.37 billion parcels, achieving a growth rate of about 140% compared to 2012, and 70% of parcels are from metropolitan areas. Given the above statistics, this paper focused on the development of an underground logistics system (ULS), in order to conduct a study to handle the freight volume in a more eco-friendly manner in the center of metropolitan areas. In this paper we first analyzed the points at which parcel boxes were damaged, based on a ULS. After collecting image data of the parcel boxes, the damaged parcel boxes were detected and classified using computerized methods, in particular, a convolutional neural network (CNN), MobileNet. For image classification, Google Colaboratory notebook was used and 4882 images were collected for the experiment. Based on the collected dataset, when conducting the experiment, the accuracy, recall, and specificity of classification for the testing set were 84.6%, 82% and 88.54%, respectively,. To validate the usefulness of the MobileNet algorithm, additional experiments were performed under the same conditions using other algorithms, VGG16 and ResNet50. The results show that MobileNet is superior to other image classification models when comparing test time. Thus, in the future, MobileNet has the potential to be used for identifying damaged boxes, and could be used to ensure the reliability and safety of parcel boxes based on a ULS.