Qi, JianchunNguyen, MinhYan, Wei Qi2024-01-302024-01-302024-01-25Multimedia Tools and Applications, ISSN: 1573-7721 (Online), Springer Science and Business Media LLC. doi: 10.1007/s11042-024-18265-11573-7721http://hdl.handle.net/10292/17160Waste categorization and recycling are critical approaches for converting waste into valuable and functional materials, thereby significantly aiding in land preservation, reducing pollution, and optimizing resource usages. However, real-world classification and identification of recyclable waste face substantial hurdles due to the intricate and unpredictable nature of wastes, as well as the limited availability of comprehensive waste datasets. These factors limit efficacy of the existing research work in the domain of waste management. In this paper, we utilize semantic segmentation at individual pixel level and introduce a semi-supervised metod for authentic waste classification scenarios, leveraging the Zerowaste dataset. We devise a non-standard data augmentation strategy that mimics the ever-changing conditions of real-world waste environments. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive weighted loss function and dynamically adjust the ratio of positive to negative samples through a masking method, ensuring the model learns from relevant samples. Lastly, to maintain consistency between predictions made on data-augmented images and the original counterparts, we remove input perturbations. Our method proves to be effective, as verified by an array of standard experiments and ablation studies, achieved an accuracy improvement of 3.74% over the baseline Zerowaste method.Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing0803 Computer Software0805 Distributed Computing0806 Information SystemsArtificial Intelligence & Image ProcessingSoftware Engineering4009 Electronics, sensors and digital hardware4603 Computer vision and multimedia computation4605 Data management and data science4606 Distributed computing and systems softwareJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.1007/s11042-024-18265-1