DEVELOPMENT OF AN AUTOMATED SORTING OF DOMESTIC PLASTIC PACKAGING FOR RECYCLING PURPOSE USING MACHINE VISION Suzaimah Ramli1, Mohd

Marzuki Mustafa1, Aini Hussain1 & Dzuraidah Abdul Wahab2 1 Dept. of Electrical, Electronic & Systems Engineering 2 Dept. of Mechanical & Materials Engineering INTRODUCTION Sorting is one of the major activities in any recycling activity. In the case of plastic, sorting is mostly done according to the resin categories, which is crucial in the recycling industry because in order for plastic to be recycled into useable resins, a pure stream of resin must be obtained. Inefficient sorting that causes combinations of PVC and PET can result in the release of hydrochloric gases (Bruno). Plastic material is generally light, able to contain most consumables and household liquid and as such, is one of the most utilized materials for domestic packaging. Plastic packaging can be made of different types of resins and the most common are PET, HDPE, LDPE, PVC, PP and PS as listed in Table 1. They are amongst the type of plastic that have numerous recycled applications. TABLE 1. Code System & Material for Plastic Bottle Recycling
Symbols of Plastic Bottle Code System

1-PETE Polyethylene Terephthalate 2-HDPE High Density Polyethylene 3-V or PVC Vinyl/Polyvinyl Chloride 4-LDPE Low Density Polyethylene 5-PP Polypropylene 6-PS Polystyrene 7-Others

Generally, there are two types of sorting systems for plastic recyclables, namely manual and automated sorting systems. Manual sorting relies on plant personnel who visually identify and pick plastic bottles as they travel along the conveyor belt system (Clean Washington Center). These bottles are then sorted into the respective containers. Despite being labor intensive, costly and inefficient due to factors such as high turnover and inexperience workforce, it is still practiced in many recycling facilities. Automated systems employ a detection system or a combination of detection systems to identify the types of plastic recyclable. The detection systems utilize state-of-the art technology to automatically sort plastics either by resin type, shape, color or both. Plastic material can be either whole bottle sorting (macro-sorting) or flake sorting (micro-sorting). Flake sorting systems sort plastic in granulated form and are able to handle large volume of material. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

In view of that, a study has been proposed to determine the viability of using machine vision for automated sorting of plastic bottles. Initially, sorting will be based on the material used for the plastic bottles. There are several types as listed in TABLE 1 but we will only sort between PET/PETE or non PET/PETE bottles. This will lead us to focus only on the 2-categorical pattern recognition task. Outcome of this research can be integrated as an embedded framework to develop an automatic plastic bottle sorting system using machine vision. Figure 1 below shows the overall system design structure, which consists of three main components namely, the pre-processing, feature extraction and classification. The development for the automated sorting of the domestic plastic packaging system uses the image processing techniques. It involves the feature extraction and image recognition modules i.e. sorting of plastic bottles/packages is based on images. The images are preprocessed and several features such as the histogram, area, perimeter, centroid, hue etc. are extracted beforehand. Digitized Image
PRE-PROCESSING Thresholding Morphological Operation Grid to get uniform image Trace boundary to get edge CLASSIFICATION ANN MLP,RBF Decision Tree Fuzzy Classifier Statistical Method

Recognized Image/Shape

FEATURE EXTRACTION Resin Type, Shape, Color, Glare, Size etc

FIGURE 1. The Overall System Structure The Pre-processing component performs the following operations: thresholding, morphological operation, grid to acquire uniform image and edge detection via boundary tracing algorithm. Thresholding is a non-linear operation that converts a gray-scale image into a binary image where the two levels are assigned to pixels that are below or above the specified threshold value. Morphological operation applies a structuring element to an input image, creating an output image of the same size. The most basic morphological operations are dilation and erosion. Edge detection refers to the process of identifying and locating sharp discontinuities in an image. The preprocessed images are further analyzed to extract important features to represent the images in a compact and reduced form. In this work, we will consider feature extractions based on the shape and color context of the plastic bottles. There are three main approaches to shape representation: 1) boundary or contour-based 2) region or area based and skeleton based The identified feature vectors are histogram of the images, histogram of FCC, Fourier descriptor and centroidal method. Thus far, we have implemented the boundary based approach using Freeman Chain Code (FCC) algorithm, which was introduced by Herbert Freeman in 1961. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION The following section describes the initial results obtained using FCC based feature vectors namely, the histogram of chain code in classifying shapes into two different classes of rounded and non-rounded shape. Neural network model of the feedforward MLP model was

used as classifier to discriminate between rounded and nonrounded shape. network is then tested and preliminary findings indicate promising results.

The trained

FCC Chain Code 3 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 7 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 (a)

FCC Chain Code 3 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 71 1 0 1 1 0 7 1 0 0 0 (b)

FIGURE 2. Samples of Preprocessed Image and generated chain code from FCC analysis (a) Rounded/Curved Shape Class, (b) Non Rounded/non-Curved Shape Class

(a)

(b)

FIGURE 3. Selected object shapes and their respective FCC histograms according to their respective classes (a) rounded/curved class, (b) non-rounded class Graphical displays of the generated feature vectors from the FCC method are shown in Figure 2 and 3. Figure 2 displays the step-by-step images of four different shapes produced during pre-processing and their generated chain code obtained via FCC based feature extraction method. On the left display representing Figure 2(a) belongs to the rounded/curved image class whilst on the right belongs to the non-rounded image class. Figure 3(a) and 3(b) on the other hand depict the FCC histograms along with their original shapes for the rounded and non-rounded class, respectively. Classification results are tabulated and shown in Table 2. TABLE 2. Classification Results
Experiment # Rounded class Non-rounded class Overall Classification Trial 1 81% 83% 82% Trial 2 90% 95% 92.5 % Trial 3 85% 89% 87%

The ANN model of the feedforward MLP model was also trained to discriminate between PET/PETE and non PET/PETE plastic bottle shape using alternative feature, the histogram of images. Results obtained are encouraging and presented in Table 3. TABLE 3. Classification Result
Experiment # Correct (%) Set 1 80 Set 2 90. 9 Set 3 76. 4 Overall 82.4

Figure 4 represent the images and histogram plots of PET and nonPET bottles respectively. From the figures, it can be seen that the histogram plots of the PET and nonPET/PETE bottles are different and has its own unique pattern. The trained MLP was then tested for its capability to distinguish between the PET and nonPET bottles. Table 3 tabulates the result with set 2 producing the best result with 90.0 percent accuracy. Set 3 produces the lowest result since the quality of the captured images was low and mostly too dark for accurate processing of the feature extraction process. If set 3 suffers from underexposure, set 1 database, on the contrary, suffers from overexposure and this has led to a slightly poor performance when compared to database set 2.

3500 35 00 20 00 3000 2500 15 00 2000 10 00 1500 1000 5 00 500 0 0 50 100 15 0 2 00 25 0 0 0 50 100 15 0 2 00 25 0 5 00 5 00 0 0 50 100 15 0 2 00 25 0 0 0 50 100 15 0 2 00 25 0 0 0 50 100 15 0 2 00 25 0 10 00 15 00 10 00 5 00 10 00 5 00 15 00 25 00 20 00 15 00 10 00 20 00 30 00 20 00 15 00 25 00 20 00

0 0 50 10 0 150 200 2 50

FIGURE 4. Images of bottles and the histogram plots, (a) PET Bottles, (b) nonPET Bottles

The use of image processing method in an automated sorting of domestic plastic packaging for recycling purpose has shown promising results. Results from the preliminary experiments confirm the worthiness of the approach since it is capable of separating objects such as in the PET and nonPET plastic shape classification task and also in the round and non-round . CONCLUSIONS Existing automated sorting systems that use technology such as Near Infra-Red, Infra Red and X-ray are costly and as such, only suitable for recycling facilities of high throughput. In Malaysia, activities on plastic recycling are still at its infancy. The recycling volume at the local Plastic Recycling Facilities (PRF) can be categorized as low to medium and it is therefore justifiable for the recycling industry to invest on cheaper yet efficient technology. This research intends to address and review state-of-the-art technologies that are currently deployed in many automated sorting systems. This paper has reported some

preliminary study using image processing as a cheaper yet efficient method for sorting plastic recyclables. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author would like to thanks UTM for the UTM-JPA SLAB scholarship award. REFERENCES
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