Trash Detection in Water Bodies Using Yolo With Explainable AI Insight

Waste disposal into water bodies is a serious concern for environmental engineers, often resulting in urban flooding, soil degradation in agricultural areas, and freshwater pollution. Additionally, trash accumulation in water bodies threatens ma-rine life by introducing contaminants through storm drains, rivers, and other channels. Furthermore, the unique character-istics of underwater environments, including high noise levels, low visibility, and color variation, pose challenges for trash detection. Thus, addressing this issue is crucial for environmental sustainability. The work focuses on both floating and submerged trash in water bodies. Typically, the detection of trash on water bodies is impacted by environmental variability, diverse appearance, and background clutter. These conditions also make usual object detection techniques less effective. Deep learning methods have shown promise in handling challenging visual tasks, therefore researchers have turned to them to get over these challenges. In this work, we focus on applying different versions of YOLO to the problem of water trash detection. To assess these models' performance, we use four different datasets: Trash Flow rate Dataset, DeepTrash, FloW, and TrashICRA. Each dataset represents various trash types under different conditions such as underwater trash and floating trash. Our study attempts to identify the best method suitable for the detection of aquatic waste. Our results highlight the effectiveness of YOLO variants in identifying the presence of trash in water ecosystems. By leveraging Grad-CAM we gain insights into the interpretability and transparency of deep learning models thus enabling Explainable AI. This approach will also contribute to the understanding and trustworthiness of artificial systems deployed for trash detection applications by providing a transparent view of decision making process of deep learning models.