Abstract
Waste accumulation is becoming a significant challenge in most urban areas and if it continues unchecked, is poised to have severe repercussions on our environment and health. The massive industrialisation in our cities has been followed by a commensurate waste creation that has become a bottleneck for even waste management systems. While recycling is a viable solution for waste management, it can be daunting to classify waste material for recycling accurately. In this study, transfer learning models were proposed to automatically classify wastes based on six materials (cardboard, glass, metal, paper, plastic, and trash). The tested pre-trained models were ResNet50, VGG16, InceptionV3, and Xception. Data augmentation was done using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with various image generation percentages. It was found that models based on Xception and VGG16 were more robust. In contrast, models based on ResNet50 and InceptionV3 were sensitive to the added machine-generated images as the accuracy degrades significantly compared to training with no artificial data.