Background

Let’s Do It AI – Image-based waste detection

Background

The Let’s Do It AI project was established by the Let’s Do It Foundation, a public benefit organisation founded in Estonia in 2011 (https://letsdoitfoundation.org/). The project focuses on tackling environmental and social problems related to illegally dumped solid waste. It aims to support urban sustainability by automatically detecting waste and pinpointing its locations in online (and offline) images and videos. The project harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) for image pattern recognition and increases the efficiency of waste management. The idea was born out of a citizen participation mapping project in 2018, which crowdsourced pictures taken manually by the project’s participants to highlight the importance of ongoing waste problems in cities at a global level. The project organizers started to discuss and develop an AI approach back in 2018 in order to scale and automate the project and to make the data more accessible and affordable for citizens and administrations around the world. With the support of Microsoft as a project partner, Let’s Do it AI used existing, publicly available online images and video feeds together with photos from their own mobile app to train the AI to recognize waste in still and video images.

The software used in the Let’s Do It AI project is an opensource development and can be used free of charge in urban environments and anywhere else where pictures are taken. The resulting image data is available for analysis. The development of the AI software, from idea to solution, took one year and was funded with €60,000 provided by investors. This money was used for gathering data, creating a data labelling tool, carrying out the data labelling itself, developing the AI algorithm (model choice), testing the algorithm, adjusting the format of the training data and managing the project. In its current state, Let’s do it AI has not yet been implemented in any city, but it is ready to be deployed.

Let’s Do It AI’s project partners include:

• The Let’s Do It Foundation (partner and project lead) • The University of California Riverside (UC Riverside) • Microsoft • CalTrans (a start-up specialized in AI) • Volunteers from different backgrounds

The overall international team includes up to 20 experts and participants from Romania, the United States and Estonia.

The project supports the following Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

1. SDG 3 "Good Health and Well-being": By improving public health through safer and cleaner environmental conditions. 2. SDG 9 "Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure": By enhancing technology and access to information for improved services and infrastructure. 3. SDG 11 "Sustainable Cities and Communities": By ensuring access to basic, sustainable services.