Papers

61,005 results
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Article Tier 2

AI – Driven Marine Debris Detection for Ocean Conservation

Researchers developed an AI-driven marine debris detection system using the YOLOv8 deep learning model trained to identify plastic waste in challenging underwater conditions including low visibility and complex backgrounds. The system aims to provide scalable, automated monitoring to support ocean conservation and guide debris removal efforts.

2025
Article Tier 2

Underwater Waste Recognition and Localization Based on Improved YOLOv5

Researchers developed an improved YOLOv5-based algorithm incorporating weighted image fusion to enhance detection and localization of underwater plastic waste in optical images, addressing challenges of noise, low contrast, and blurred textures in aquatic environments.

2023 Computers, materials & continua/Computers, materials & continua (Print) 8 citations
Article Tier 2

Improving YOLOv11 for marine water quality monitoring and pollution source identification

Researchers improved the YOLOv11 computer vision model to better detect and identify marine pollution sources, including oil spills, debris, and turbid water, in complex underwater environments. The enhanced model achieved higher detection accuracy and faster processing speeds compared to the standard version. The study demonstrates that advanced AI-based monitoring tools can meaningfully improve our ability to track and respond to marine pollution in real time.

2025 Scientific Reports 4 citations
Article Tier 2

Towards More Efficient EfficientDets and Real-Time Marine Debris Detection

Researchers improved the efficiency of a class of AI-based object detection systems called EfficientDets for real-time identification of marine debris underwater. Their optimized models achieved better accuracy while running faster, making them more practical for use on autonomous underwater vehicles. This technology could help enable automated detection and removal of ocean plastic waste, which breaks down into harmful microplastics over time.

2023 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 49 citations
Article Tier 2

PBM‐YOLO: A Performance Balanced Floating Garbage Detection Model for Water Surface Environments

Researchers developed PBM-YOLO, a performance-balanced deep learning model for detecting floating garbage including plastic debris on water surfaces, optimising the architecture to balance detection accuracy and computational efficiency for practical deployment in ecological protection and waterway resource recycling applications.

2025 IET Image Processing
Article Tier 2

TECI-YOLO: An Efficient, Lightweight Model for Detecting Small Floating Objects on Water Surfaces

Despite its title referencing floating object detection on water, this paper studies a machine learning model (TECI-YOLO) for detecting small objects on water surfaces using computer vision — not microplastic pollution. It examines improvements in detection accuracy and computational efficiency for real-time marine monitoring and is not directly relevant to microplastics research.

2026 Journal of Computer Science and Frontier Technologies
Article Tier 2

Implementation of YOLOv5 for Detection and Classification of Microplastics and Microorganisms in Marine Environment

Researchers trained a YOLOv5 deep learning model on marine environment images and demonstrated it can accurately detect and classify both microplastics and microorganisms in real time, offering a memory-efficient tool for automated environmental monitoring.

2023 7 citations
Article Tier 2

A Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning Algorithms for Underwater Trash Detection: Advancements, Challenges, and Future Directions

This review examines deep learning approaches for automated underwater trash detection, covering CNN-based architectures including YOLO and Faster R-CNN, and finds they outperform traditional sonar and manual inspection methods while identifying key challenges such as low visibility and limited labeled datasets.

2025 Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Article Tier 2

A Comprehensive Review of Deep Learning Algorithms for Underwater Trash Detection: Advancements, Challenges, and Future Directions

This review examines deep learning approaches for automated underwater trash detection, covering CNN-based architectures including YOLO and Faster R-CNN, and finds they outperform traditional sonar and manual inspection methods while identifying key challenges such as low visibility and limited labeled datasets.

2025 Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Article Tier 2

An automated solid waste detection using the optimized YOLO model for riverine management

Researchers developed an optimized YOLO-based deep learning model for automated detection of solid waste in rivers, achieving high accuracy in identifying floating debris to support autonomous robotic riverine cleanup systems.

2022 Frontiers in Public Health 38 citations
Article Tier 2

Efficient Object Detection of Marine Debris using Pruned YOLO Model

Researchers applied a pruned YOLOv4 object detection model to identify marine debris, including microplastic-contaminated items, in underwater images. Channel pruning reduced the model size by 90% while maintaining detection accuracy, making it suitable for deployment on autonomous underwater vehicles. The study demonstrates that efficient machine learning models can support real-time marine debris detection and cleanup efforts.

2025 ArXiv.org 1 citations
Article Tier 2

YOLOv7-Based Microplastic Detection: Crafting a Custom Dataset for Environmental Analysis

Researchers used three versions of the YOLO object detection model to detect and count microplastics from a custom-built dataset. YOLOv8 achieved the highest overall accuracy at 81.4%, followed by YOLOv7 at 80.7% and YOLOv9 at 77.2%, though YOLOv7 performed best with real-time test data. The study demonstrates the potential of AI-based detection systems for automating microplastic identification in environmental samples.

2025 1 citations
Article Tier 2

WaveFilter: Advanced Imaging for Marine Microplastic Monitoring

This paper describes WaveFilter, a deep-learning system based on the YOLOv5 model trained to automatically detect microplastics in images of aquatic environments, achieving about 80% precision in identifying plastic particles even against complex backgrounds. The model is compact enough for real-time deployment, offering a faster and more scalable alternative to tedious manual counting methods. Automated detection tools like this could make large-scale marine microplastic monitoring more practical and consistent.

2025 1 citations
Article Tier 2

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

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.

2025
Article Tier 2

An Image Analysis of Coastal Debris Detection -Detection of microplastics using deep learning-

Researchers developed a deep learning-based coastal debris detection system using YOLOv7 and the SAHI vision library to identify microplastics in image data collected from shorelines. The system demonstrated effective detection performance and offers a scalable approach for automated monitoring of microplastic litter in coastal environments.

2024 Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Life and Robotics
Article Tier 2

Detection of Trash in Sea Using Deep Learning

Researchers developed a deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) model to detect and classify trash in marine and aquatic environments from underwater images, aiming to overcome the limitations of manual debris detection for objects that may be submerged or partially obscured.

2022 YMER Digital
Article Tier 2

Aquatic Trash Detection and Classification: a Machine Learning and Deep Learning Perspective

This review examines machine learning and deep learning approaches for detecting and classifying aquatic trash in waterways, evaluating how computer vision algorithms trained on underwater and surface imagery can automate pollution monitoring for faster, more scalable ocean cleanup.

2025 International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science
Article Tier 2

Enhancing marine debris identification with convolutional neural networks

A deep learning model was developed to identify and classify marine debris components captured by underwater remotely operated vehicle imagery, addressing the challenge of widely distributed ocean waste including microplastics. The convolutional neural network demonstrated improved accuracy for debris detection and classification compared to conventional image analysis methods.

2024 Journal of Emerging Investigators 1 citations
Article Tier 2

Full stage networks with auxiliary focal loss and multi-attention module for submarine garbage object detection

Researchers developed a new AI-based detection system using modified YOLO neural networks to identify and locate garbage objects on the seafloor in complex underwater images. The system uses multi-scale feature extraction and a specialized loss function to accurately detect small and deformed debris items, supporting robotic clean-up efforts in marine environments.

2023 Scientific Reports 9 citations
Article Tier 2

FindingPlastic: Underwater Plastic Bag Detection and Retrieval

Engineers developed an automated system using artificial intelligence to detect, track, and capture floating plastic bags underwater before they break down into microplastics. The system combines modern object detection and tracking algorithms and was successfully tested in a tank environment, offering a potential tool for robotic ocean cleanup efforts.

2024 4 citations
Article Tier 2

Automatic Detection of Microplastics in the Aqueous Environment

Researchers developed a deep-learning system for real-time detection and counting of microplastics in freshwater, achieving high accuracy for particles 1 mm and larger.

2023 10 citations
Article Tier 2

Towards More Efficient EfficientDets and Low-Light Real-Time Marine Debris Detection

Researchers improved the computational efficiency of EfficientDet object detectors and applied them to real-time marine debris detection for autonomous underwater vehicles, achieving AP gains of 1.2-2.6% without increased GPU latency, creating a new in-water plastic bag and bottle dataset, and investigating detection performance degradation under low-light underwater conditions.

2022 arXiv (Cornell University) 3 citations
Article Tier 2

Projector deep feature extraction-based garbage image classification model using underwater images

Researchers developed a deep learning model using projector-based feature extraction to classify underwater garbage images, achieving high accuracy in identifying marine plastic debris and other waste types for automated ocean pollution monitoring.

2024 Multimedia Tools and Applications 8 citations
Article Tier 2

Identification and detection of microplastic particles in marine environment by using improved faster R–CNN model

Researchers developed an improved Faster R-CNN deep learning model for identifying and detecting microplastic particles in marine environments. The model achieved an average detection confidence of 99% and successfully distinguished polystyrene microplastics from mixed particle suspensions across varying backgrounds and conditions, demonstrating a promising automated approach for monitoring microplastic pollution.

2023 Journal of Environmental Management 33 citations