# SortWaste: A Densely Annotated Dataset for Object Detection in Industrial Waste Sorting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02299 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02299/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14458/) (2024)
- [YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17725/) (2024)
- [Scale-Aware Trident Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.01892/) (2019)
- [ZeroWaste Dataset: Towards Deformable Object Segmentation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02740/) (2021)
- [TACO: Trash Annotations in Context for Litter Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06975/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The increasing production of waste, driven by population growth, has created challenges in managing and recycling materials effectively. Manual waste sorting is a common practice; however, it remains inefficient for handling large-scale waste streams and presents health risks for workers. On the other hand, existing automated sorting approaches still struggle with the high variability, clutter, and visual complexity of real-world waste streams. The lack of real-world datasets for waste sorting is a major reason automated systems for this problem are underdeveloped. Accordingly, we introduce SortWaste, a densely annotated object detection dataset collected from a Material Recovery Facility. Additionally, we contribute to standardizing waste detection in sorting lines by proposing ClutterScore, an objective metric that gauges the scene's hardness level using a set of proxies that affect visual complexity (e.g., object count, class and size entropy, and spatial overlap). In addition to these contributions, we provide an extensive benchmark of state-of-the-art object detection models, detailing their results with respect to the hardness level assessed by the proposed metric. Despite achieving promising results (mAP of 59.7% in the plastic-only detection task), performance significantly decreases in highly cluttered scenes. This highlights the need for novel and more challenging datasets on the topic.