An Intelligent Detection System for Monitoring Food Waste in School Dining Rooms

Food waste is a significant issue in China, with enough food wasted every year to feed 200 million people. To address this issue, the Clear Plate campaign was launched to encourage people to eat all the food ordered and develop the habit of buying as much as they eat. However, the campaign lacks an effective supervision mechanism and technology. To address this issue, AI computer vision technology is used to capture the image of the meal plate in students’ hands while recycling the meal plate in campus canteens to identify whether the plate is clear or not in real time. In addition, students who participate in the Clear Plate campaign are rewarded with points to exchange for drinks, fruit, and other small gifts. The project includes the collection and feature extraction of Clear Plate sample data, clear the plate recognition model training, recognition experiments and analysis, and the development of a Clear Plate recognition prototype system using Python. The project’s contributions include providing a comprehensive solution to Clear Plate intelligent recognition for canteen users, developing classification models for identifying the category of plates and whether dishes are clear, and developing a detection system based on the image acquired by the camera.