Mobile app for identifying recyclable items using a convolutional neural network
Issues in Information Systems · 2025
This project focused on developing a mobile app that could identify recyclable items and provide instructions for recycling or disposal.The use of such an app can help in appropriately recycling items, increasing the number of items that a household might recycle and improving the effectiveness and speed of recycling at the recycling plant.To easily identify items, the app uses the phone's camera to allow a person to take a picture of an item.The first phase of the project created a mobile app that sends a photo to a cloud server running a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that performs the classification.The server application then looks up recycling instructions on a MySql database and sends back the instructions to the mobile app.The mobile app also has a local version of the database so that items can be looked up locally.A key focus of the project explored the public datasets that were available for recycling, trained various mobile-oriented CNNs to determine their effectiveness using these public datasets, tuned hyperparameters for optimum performance of each model, and selected the best CNN, dataset and framework that could ultimately allow the app to be deployed natively on a mobile platform.