Papers

61,005 results
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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

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

An Embeddable Algorithm for Automatic Garbage Detection Based on Complex Marine Environment

Researchers developed an improved object detection algorithm based on Mask R-CNN with dilated convolution in the feature pyramid network to enable more accurate automated identification and segmentation of marine garbage by underwater detectors. The embeddable algorithm is designed to function effectively in complex, low-resolution underwater environments.

2021 Sensors 45 citations
Article Tier 2

Underwater and airborne monitoring of marine ecosystems and debris

Researchers demonstrated that the deep-learning object detection algorithm YOLO v3 can detect underwater sea life and floating marine debris with mean average precision of 69.6% and 77.2% respectively, using autonomous underwater and aerial robots. The study proposes this approach as a foundation for scalable autonomous monitoring systems capable of tracking marine ecosystems and plastic debris across oceanographic scales.

2019 Journal of Applied Remote Sensing 90 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

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

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

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

YOLOv8-C2f-Faster-EMA: An Improved Underwater Trash Detection Model Based on YOLOv8

Researchers improved an AI-based object detection system (YOLOv8) to better identify small pieces of underwater trash, achieving a 5% improvement in detection accuracy. Automated trash detection in waterways matters because removing plastic waste before it breaks into microplastics can reduce the amount of tiny plastic particles that eventually contaminate drinking water and seafood.

2024 Sensors 63 citations
Article Tier 2

Plastic Waste on Water Surfaces Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Researchers evaluated state-of-the-art convolutional neural network architectures for automatically detecting plastic waste on water surfaces, training models on a dataset representing four categories of plastic litter including plastic bags. The study benchmarked multiple CNN object detection models following extensive dataset preprocessing to determine the most effective approach for automated plastic pollution identification.

2024
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

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

Balancing Feature Symmetry: IFEM-YOLOv13 for Robust Underwater Object Detection Under Degradation

This paper presents IFEM-YOLOv13, a deep learning detection system designed to overcome image degradation challenges in underwater object detection. Innovations including adaptive optical compensation and feature enhancement modules improved detection accuracy for small and partially obscured targets including microplastic debris.

2025 Symmetry 2 citations
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

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

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

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

Slim Deep Learning Approach for Microplastics Image Classification in the Marine Environment

Researchers developed a lightweight convolutional neural network called the Slim-DL-Model for classifying microplastics in marine environment images, designed to overcome the computational demands of existing architectures like VGG16 and ResNet for real-time field applications. The model achieves competitive classification accuracy while significantly reducing computational requirements, enabling deployable microplastic monitoring systems.

2025 Cognizance Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies
Article Tier 2

Smart Ocean Cleanup: An AI-Integrated Autonomous System for Marine Waste Management

This paper presents an AI-powered autonomous boat system designed to detect and collect marine pollution — including plastics, oil spills, and microplastics — using deep learning image classification, IoT sensors, and robotic collection mechanisms. The system demonstrated over 94% accuracy for pollutant detection and classification across several AI models. While focused more broadly on ocean cleanup technology than on microplastic science specifically, it demonstrates how AI-integrated robotics could help address the practical challenge of removing plastic waste from ocean surfaces before it breaks down further.

2025 1 citations
Article Tier 2

Amphitrite v1.0: An underwater database for marine debris and biodiversity

Researchers created Amphitrite v1.0, an underwater database of 16 labeled categories of marine debris and biodiversity images suitable for training computer vision models for automated marine litter detection, validated against the latest YOLO object recognition architectures.

2025 Figshare
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

GoogLeNet-Based Deep Learning Framework for Underwater Microplastic Classification in Marine Environments

Researchers trained a GoogLeNet deep learning model on underwater images to classify microplastics into four categories, achieving strong classification performance for primary microplastics, secondary microplastics, non-microplastic debris, and marine biota in turbid coastal waters.

2025