Abstract
Estimating the volume of macro-plastics which dot the world’s oceans is one of the most pressing environmental concerns of our time. Prevailing methods for determining the amount of floating plastic debris, usually conducted manually, are time demanding and rather limited in coverage. With the aid of deep learning, herein, we propose a fast, scalable, and potentially cost-effective method for automatically identifying floating marine plastics. When trained on three categories of plastic marine litter, that is, bottles, buckets, and straws, the classifier was able to successfully recognize the preceding floating objects at a success rate of ≈ 86%. Apparently, the high level of accuracy and efficiency of the developed machine learning tool constitutes a leap towards unraveling the true scale of floating plastics.
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Funding
K. K. acknowledges financial support from the Universitas Foundation, the A. G. Leventis Foundation, and the University of Nicosia. A. A.’s work is financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 739551 (KIOS CoE) and from the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development.
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Kylili, K., Kyriakides, I., Artusi, A. et al. Identifying floating plastic marine debris using a deep learning approach. Environ Sci Pollut Res 26, 17091–17099 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-05148-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-05148-4