Plastic pollution is a critical environmental issue, and detecting and monitoring plastic litter is crucial to mitigate its impact. This paper presents the methodology of mapping street-level litter, focusing primarily on plastic waste and the location of trash bins. Our methodology involves employing a deep learning technique to identify litter and trash bins from street-level imagery taken by a camera mounted on a vehicle. Subsequently, we utilized heat maps to visually represent the distribution of litter and trash bins throughout cities. Additionally, we provide details about the creation of an open-source dataset ("pLitterStreet") which was developed and utilized in our approach. The dataset contains more than 13,000 fully annotated images collected from vehicle-mounted cameras and includes bounding box labels. To evaluate the effectiveness of our dataset, we tested four well known state-of-the-art object detection algorithms (Faster R-CNN, RetinaNet, YOLOv3, and YOLOv5), achieving an average precision (AP) above 40%. While the results show average metrics, our experiments demonstrated the reliability of using vehicle-mounted cameras for plastic litter mapping. The "pLitterStreet" can also be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners to develop and further improve existing machine learning models for detecting and mapping plastic litter in an urban environment. The dataset is open-source and more details about the dataset and trained models can be found at https://github.com/gicait/pLitter.

这篇论文介绍了通过使用深度学习技术和车载摄像头拍摄的街道图像来对垃圾和垃圾桶进行识别和定位的方法，同时提供了一个名为“pLitterStreet”的开源数据集，该数据集包含超过13,000张完全标注的图片，可用于检测和映射城市中的塑料垃圾。

pLitterStreet: 街道级塑料垃圾检测与绘制