Recycled Clothing Classification System Using Intelligent IoT and Deep Learning with AlexNet

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), led by machine learning and deep learning, have emerged as key technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). In particular, object recognition technology using deep learning is currently being used in various fields, and thanks to the strong performance and potential of deep learning, many research groups and Information Technology (IT) companies are currently investing heavily in deep learning. The textile industry involves a lot of human resources in all processes, such as raw material collection, dyeing, processing, and sewing, and the wastage of resources and energy and increase in environmental pollution are caused by the short-term waste of clothing produced during these processes. Environmental pollution can be reduced to a great extent through the use of recycled clothing. In Korea, the utilization rate of recycled clothing is increasing, the amount of used clothing is high with the annual consumption being at $56.2 billion, but it is not properly utilized because of the manual recycling clothing collection system. It has several problems such as a closed workplace environment, workers' health, rising labor costs, and low processing speed that make it difficult to apply the existing clothing recognition technology, classified by deformation and overlapping of clothing shapes, when transporting recycled clothing to the conveyor belt. In this study, I propose a recycled clothing classification system with IoT and AI using object recognition technology to the problems. The IoT device consists of Raspberry pi and a camera, and AI uses the transfer-learned AlexNet to classify different types of clothing. As a result of this study, it was confirmed that the types of recycled clothing using artificial intelligence could be predicted and accurate classification work could be performed instead of the experience and know-how of working workers in the clothing classification worksite, which is a closed space. This will lead to the innovative direction of the recycling clothing classification work that was performed by people in the existing working worker. In other words, it is expected that standardization of necessary processes, utilization of artificial intelligence, application of automation system, various cost reduction, and work efficiency improvement will be achieved.