Automated Landfill Detection Using Deep Learning: A Comparative Study of Lightweight and Custom Architectures with the AerialWaste Dataset

Nowshin Sharmily; Rusab Sarmun; Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury; Mir Hamidul Hussain; Saad Bin Abul Kashem; Molla E Majid; Amith Khandakar

arXiv · 2508.18315

Automated Landfill Detection Using Deep Learning: A Comparative Study of Lightweight and Custom Architectures with the AerialWaste Dataset

Nowshin Sharmily·Rusab Sarmun·Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury·Mir Hamidul Hussain·Saad Bin Abul Kashem·Molla E Majid·Amith Khandakar

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Abstract

Illegal landfills are posing as a hazardous threat to people all over the world. Due to the arduous nature of manually identifying the location of landfill, many landfills go unnoticed by authorities and later cause dangerous harm to people and environment. Deep learning can play a significant role in identifying these landfills while saving valuable time, manpower and resources. Despite being a burning concern, good quality publicly released datasets for illegal landfill detection are hard to find due to security concerns. However, AerialWaste Dataset is a large collection of 10434 images of Lombardy region of Italy. The images are of varying qualities, collected from three different sources: AGEA Orthophotos, WorldView-3, and Google Earth. The dataset contains professionally curated, diverse and high-quality images which makes it particularly suitable for scalable and impactful research. As we trained several models to compare results, we found complex and heavy models to be prone to overfitting and memorizing training data instead of learning patterns. Therefore, we chose lightweight simpler models which could leverage general features from the dataset. In this study, Mobilenetv2, Googlenet, Densenet, MobileVit and other lightweight deep learning models were used to train and validate the dataset as they achieved significant success with less overfitting. As we saw substantial improvement in the performance using some of these models, we combined the best performing models and came up with an ensemble model. With the help of ensemble and fusion technique, binary classification could be performed on this dataset with 92.33% accuracy, 92.67% precision, 92.33% sensitivity, 92.41% F1 score and 92.71% specificity.

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BibTeX RIS

Nowshin Sharmily, Rusab Sarmun, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury, Mir Hamidul Hussain, Saad Bin Abul Kashem, Molla E Majid, Amith Khandakar. 2025-08-23. Automated Landfill Detection Using Deep Learning: A Comparative Study of Lightweight and Custom Architectures with the AerialWaste Dataset. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18315

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