Medical waste sorting: a computer vision approach for assisted primary sorting

Bruno A, Caudai C, Leone Gr, Martinelli M, Moroni D, Crotti F

Medical waste management  Computer vision  Image classification  Annotated dataset  Automated sorting 

Medical waste, i.e. waste produced during medical activities in hospitals, clinics and laboratories, represents hazardous waste whose management requires special care and high costs. However, this kind of waste contains a large fraction of highly valued materials that can enter a circular economy process. To this end, in this paper, we propose a computer vision approach for assisting in the primary sorting of med- ical waste. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated on representative datasets we collected and made available to the community.