Classification for plastic bottles recycling based on image recognition

Recycling of used plastic bottles is an important measure to protect the environment and save energy. Usually, bottles in different colors have different value for recycling. Classification of plastic bottles recycling based on image recognition during recycling is an effective way, where the position and color recognition are the key technologies. To classify the plastic bottles on the conveyor belt, their position relationships are firstly defined as three categories, i.e. disjoint, adjacent and overlapping. The disjoint ones can be easily identified by the ratio of concave and convex area based on their image. For the adjacent and overlapping bottles, a combination method called distance transformation and threshold segmentation is proposed to distinguish their position relationships. Once the adjacent bottles are identified, the method of concave point search based on convex hull will be used to separate the adjacent recycled bottles further. Then, the color of both the disjoint and adjacent bottles is identified because it is too complex and difficult to recognize color of and separate the overlapping bottles. In the aspect of color recognition, the colors of recycled bottles are divided into seven categories in the sorting process. Color features of the bottom section are used to represent the one of the recycled bottle because there may be a bottle cap and a label on the top and in the middle of the bottle, respectively, resulting in the wrong recognition. ReliefF algorithm is applied to select color features of recycled bottles and the color is identified by support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. The influence of training sample size on classification model is studied and the experimental results show that the accuracy of color recognition of recycled bottles reach 94.7%.