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Deep Learning Approaches for Detection and Classification of Microplastics in Water for Clean Water Management

2025
Nandana Biju, Gobi Ramasamy

Summary

Researchers applied dual deep learning models (YOLOv8, YOLOv11, and several CNN architectures) to detect and classify microplastics in water, finding that these AI approaches could accurately identify plastic types across both aquatic and non-aquatic datasets.

Microplastic pollution is a growing environmental concern, threatening aquatic ecosystems and human health. This study presents a dual deep learning approach for microplastic detection and classification using two datasets. For water microplastics, YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 were employed for object detection. InceptionV3, VGG19, ResNet50, ResNet152, DenseNet121, EfficientNetB0, and a custom CNN were applied for classification, classifying three distinct microplastic types in non-aquatic environments. Experimental findings display high accuracy, and indicate the potential of AI-enabled solutions for environmental monitoring. This research contributes to SDG 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation, promoting sustainable management of water.

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