Detection of Small-Sized Electronics Endangering Facilities Involved in Recycling Processes Using Deep Learning

In Japan, local governments implore residents to remove the batteries from small-sized electronics before recycling them, but some products still contain lithium-ion batteries. These residual batteries may cause fires, resulting in serious injuries or property damage. Explosive materials such as mobile batteries (such as power banks) have been identified in fire investigations. Therefore, these fire-causing items should be detected and separated regardless of whether small-sized electronics recycling or other recycling processes are in use. This study focuses on the automatic detection of fire-causing items using deep learning in recycling small-sized electronic products. Mobile batteries were chosen as the first target of this approach. In this study, MATLAB R2024b was applied to construct the You Only Look Once version 4 deep learning algorithm. The model was trained to enable the detection of mobile batteries. The results show that the model’s average precision value reached 0.996. Then, the target was expanded to three categories of fire-causing items, including mobile batteries, heated tobacco (electronic cigarettes), and smartphones. Furthermore, real-time object detection on videos using the trained detector was carried out. The trained detector was able to detect all the target products accurately. In conclusion, deep learning technologies show significant promise as a method for safe and high-quality recycling.