SWDet: Anchor-Based Object Detector for Solid Waste Detection in Aerial Images

As we all know, waste pollution is one of the most serious environmental issues in the world. Efficient detection of solid waste (SW) in aerial images can improve subsequent waste classification and automatic sorting on the ground. However, traditional methods have some problems, such as poor generalization and limited detection performance. This article presents an anchor-based object detector for solid waste in aerial images (SWDet). Specifically, we construct asymmetric deep aggregation (ADA) network with structurally reparameterized asymmetric blocks to extract waste features with inconspicuous appearance. Besides, considering the waste with blurred boundaries caused by the resolution of aerial images, this article constructs efficient attention fusion pyramid network (EAFPN) to obtain contextual information and multiscale geospatial information via attention fusion. And the model can capture the scattering features of irregular shape waste. In addition, we construct the dataset for solid waste aerial detection (SWAD) by collecting aerial images of SW in Henan Province, China, to validate the effectiveness of our method. Experimental results show that SWDet outperforms most of existing methods for SW detection in aerial images.