Intelligent Waste Separator

Andrés Torres-García, Oscar Rodea-Aragón, Omar Longoria-Gandara, Francisco Sánchez-García, Luis Enrique González-Jiménez

Jesuit University of Guadalajara, Department of Electronics, Systems and IT (ITESO), México. andrestoga@ieee.org, oscarodea@ieee.org, olongoria@iteso.mx, im681462@iteso.mx, luisgonzalez@iteso.mx

Corresponding author is Andrés Torres-García.

Article received on 03/12/2014. ]]> Accepted on 10/04/2015.

Abstract

Nowadays, trash has become a problem in the society and the ecosystem due to the way people get rid of it. Most of garbage is buried or burnt or even kept in places to which it does not belong. Big volumes of garbage thrown away and the methods used to store it cause air, water, and soil pollution. Fortunately, people can count on other methods to reduce the quantity of produced litter. An answer is recycling by re-using the materials. Currently, the traditional way to separate waste is to use different containers for each kind of waste separating trash manually, which does not always work. The aim of this paper is to present an Intelligent Waste Separator (IWS) which can replace the traditional way of dealing with waste; the proposed device receives the incoming waste and places it automatically in different containers by using a multimedia embedded processor, image processing, and machine learning in order to select and separate waste.

Keywords: Multimedia embedded processor, human machine interface, machine learning, trash can, ecosystem preservation.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by ITESO-Jesuit University of Guadalajara and Intel. The authors thank CINVESTAV-Unidad Guadalajara, especially Heriberto Casarubias Vargas and Alberto Petrilli for their support in bringing light in the dark to start this project from scratch.

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