Towards real-time sorting of recyclable goods using support vector machines

The amount of recyclable material being processed worldwide is increasing. There is a demand for new technologies that can quickly sort these materials for maximum purity while maintaining high throughput. This paper proposes a method to automatically sort two materials: polycoat containers and PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) bottles. This method utilizes a visible light camera and does not rely on Near-Infrared spectrometry. This paper proposes a high-speed method to automatically locate regions that likely contain these materials within the image and removes them from the background. These regions are merged into whole containers and are classified as either a polycoat container or PET bottle. This is accomplished using a linear support vector machine (SVM) trained on the histogram of pixel intensities. The proposed method obtained a 93% recognition rate, and is able to run at high frames rates in real-time using a field-programmable gate array.