Objectively measuring how clean our cities are

EPFL researchers have come up with a fact-based system to measure urban cleanliness. Municipal authorities will now be able to draw on objective assessments when planning their street cleaning - a sector with multi-million-franc budgets. The concept is straightforward: on one hand, vehicles equipped with video cameras to record the city streets, and on the other, a computer able to spot waste, identify it and classify it - in the blink of an eye. A researcher from EPFL's Signal Processing Laboratory 5 (LTS5) , working with local startup Cortexia , the Haute Ecole Arc and several Swiss cities, has created a system that provides cities with an objective way of assessing the cleanliness of their streets, including detailed information on the amount, type and location of waste. The system should help them decide which and how many street sweepers to purchase, how often to clean the streets, and which areas need to be cleaned more often because they are dirtier or because the garbage there is more dangerous. With a fact-based assessment at their fingertips that showed what sort of trash is located where, and which areas are hardest hit, city officials would be able to implement much more efficient - and potentially much less expensive - street-cleaning programs. That's the approach described in an article appearing in Computer Vision Systems . A definition of cleanliness based on human perceptions