Inspiration
Inspired by the energy and sustainability vertical as well as our own personal experiences being confused, our team created an app that allows a user to take a photo of an object; and the app will classify the object as either trash, compost, or recyclable.
What it does
The aim of this app is to help users more easily and accurately throw their trash away, in order to increase the use of recycle and compost. This will hopefully help create a more sustainable world and decrease the amount of trash that ends up in landfills.
How we built it
Using React Native, we created the app and user interface. In the background, we leveraged Flask API to run our machine learning model. Our model consists of a pre-trained neural network called ResNet50, which is further narrowed down for our purposes with an extra convolutional layer.
Challenges we ran into
The process of creating our project was challenging yet extremely rewarding. Although creating our machine learning model went smoothly, connecting it and the output to a mobile application posed a challenge. Passing the data from the app to the model and back was challenging. We tested many different approaches, and we were ultimately able to overcome it as a group with Flask API.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're exceptionally proud of how versatile and the success rate of our app. It can easily be applied to a wide range of photos from several different angles and on relatively complex backgrounds. Our app can truly be used in the real world.
What we learned
This was a huge learning experience for all of us, as we learned how to use a tool that none of us had ever used before. Even with the approaches that didn’t work, there was a lot of learning with new tools that occurred, like Flutter.
What's next for Trash Categorization
In terms of what’s next, we’re hoping to expand our app to include finding the nearest compost, trash, or recycling bin to incentivize people to throw their identified trash away properly. This would be a great addition to our app that will enhance our goal of sustainability and the user experience
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