SortWaste: A Densely Annotated Dataset for Object Detection in Industrial Waste Sorting

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Inácio, Sara, Proença, Hugo, Neves, João C.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Inácio, Sara
Proença, Hugo
Neves, João C.
author_facet Inácio, Sara
Proença, Hugo
Neves, João C.
contents The increasing production of waste, driven by population growth, has created challenges in managing and recycling materials effectively. Manual waste sorting is a common practice; however, it remains inefficient for handling large-scale waste streams and presents health risks for workers. On the other hand, existing automated sorting approaches still struggle with the high variability, clutter, and visual complexity of real-world waste streams. The lack of real-world datasets for waste sorting is a major reason automated systems for this problem are underdeveloped. Accordingly, we introduce SortWaste, a densely annotated object detection dataset collected from a Material Recovery Facility. Additionally, we contribute to standardizing waste detection in sorting lines by proposing ClutterScore, an objective metric that gauges the scene's hardness level using a set of proxies that affect visual complexity (e.g., object count, class and size entropy, and spatial overlap). In addition to these contributions, we provide an extensive benchmark of state-of-the-art object detection models, detailing their results with respect to the hardness level assessed by the proposed metric. Despite achieving promising results (mAP of 59.7% in the plastic-only detection task), performance significantly decreases in highly cluttered scenes. This highlights the need for novel and more challenging datasets on the topic.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02299
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SortWaste: A Densely Annotated Dataset for Object Detection in Industrial Waste Sorting
Inácio, Sara
Proença, Hugo
Neves, João C.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The increasing production of waste, driven by population growth, has created challenges in managing and recycling materials effectively. Manual waste sorting is a common practice; however, it remains inefficient for handling large-scale waste streams and presents health risks for workers. On the other hand, existing automated sorting approaches still struggle with the high variability, clutter, and visual complexity of real-world waste streams. The lack of real-world datasets for waste sorting is a major reason automated systems for this problem are underdeveloped. Accordingly, we introduce SortWaste, a densely annotated object detection dataset collected from a Material Recovery Facility. Additionally, we contribute to standardizing waste detection in sorting lines by proposing ClutterScore, an objective metric that gauges the scene's hardness level using a set of proxies that affect visual complexity (e.g., object count, class and size entropy, and spatial overlap). In addition to these contributions, we provide an extensive benchmark of state-of-the-art object detection models, detailing their results with respect to the hardness level assessed by the proposed metric. Despite achieving promising results (mAP of 59.7% in the plastic-only detection task), performance significantly decreases in highly cluttered scenes. This highlights the need for novel and more challenging datasets on the topic.
title SortWaste: A Densely Annotated Dataset for Object Detection in Industrial Waste Sorting
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02299