Computer vision segmentation model—deep learning for categorizing microplastic debris

The characterization of beached and marine microplastic debris is critical to understanding how plastic litter accumulates across the world’s oceans and identifying hotspots that should be targeted for early cleanup efforts. Currently, the most common monitoring method to quantify microplastics at sea requires physical sampling using surface trawling and sifting for beached microplastics, which are then followed by manual counting and laboratory analysis. The need for manual counting is time-consuming, operator-dependent, and incurs high costs, thereby preventing scalable deployment of consistent marine plastic monitoring worldwide. Here, we describe a workflow combining a simple experimental setup with advanced image processing techniques to conduct both quantitative and qualitative assessments of microplastic (0.05 cm < particle size <0.5 cm). The image processing relies on deep learning models designed for image segmentation and classification. The results demonstrated comparable or superior performance in comparison to manual identification for microplastic particles with a 96% accuracy. Thus, the use of the model offers an efficient, more robust, standardized, highly replicable, and less labor-intensive alternative to particle counting. In addition to the relative simplicity of the network architecture used that made it easy to train, the model presents promising prospects for better-standardized reporting of plastic particles surveyed in the environment. We also made the models and datasets open-source and created a user-friendly web interface for directly annotating new images.