WCSE

Real-Time Detection of Floating Debris in Waterways Using YOLOv8

Abstract— The urbanization of most waterways has led to a significant amount of pollution in the multiple bodies of water, with mostly floating debris contributing to the environmental threat. The Philippines has contributed to immense discharge of plastic waste into rivers. Furthermore, the prevalence of invasive aquatic plants disrupts the ecosystem of the water bodies and affect economic activities. Traditional methods of monitoring water surface debris are inefficient and resource-demanding. This study proposes the development of an object detection model based on YOLOv8 to identify floating debris on a water surface accurately and in real-time, including garbage and invasive plants. The researchers created a dataset of floating debris. Image preprocessing techniques such as resizing, orientation, resizing, contrast adjustment, and augmentation were done to improve the dataset. The researchers tuned the model in terms of optimizer using Adam and Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and learning rates of 0.01 and 0.001. Upon evaluation, the researchers determined that the model using the SGD optimizer performed better than the model using Adam optimizer in floating debris detection. The researchers further determined that the model performed best when utilizing the best weights from training and a learning rate of 0.001 with the SGD optimizer.

Index Terms— Water surface debris, object detection, YOLOv8, floating debris detection, environmental monitoring

John Paul Q. Tomas
Mapúa University, PHILIPPINES
Jan Edgar E. Tupas
Mapúa University, PHILIPPINES
Miguel T. Soniel
Mapúa University, PHILIPPINES
Christian Henry Miguel E. Caruz
Mapúa University, PHILIPPINES
Darryll B. Babar
Mapúa University, PHILIPPINES

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Cite: John Paul Q. Tomas, Jan Edgar E. Tupas, Miguel T. Soniel, Christian Henry Miguel E. Caruz, Darryll B. Babar, "Real-Time Detection of Floating Debris in Waterways Using YOLOv8," 2024 The 14th International Workshop on Computer Science and Engineering (WCSE 2024), pp. 6-15, Phuket Island, Thailand, June 19-21, 2024.