StreetView-Waste: A Multi-Task Dataset for Urban Waste Management
Abstract
Urban waste management remains a critical challenge for the development of smart cities. Despite the growing number of litter detection datasets, the problem of monitoring overflowing waste containers — particularly from images captured by garbage trucks — has received little attention. While existing datasets are valuable, they often lack annotations for specific container tracking or are captured in static, decontextualized environments, limiting their utility for real-world logistics. To address this gap, we present StreetView-Waste, a comprehensive dataset of urban scenes featuring litter and waste containers. The dataset supports three key evaluation tasks: (1) waste container detection, (2) waste container tracking, and (3) waste overflow segmentation.Alongside the dataset, we provide baselines for each task by benchmarking state-of-the-art models in object detection, tracking, and segmentation. Additionally, we enhance baseline performance by proposing two complementary strategies: a heuristic-based method for improved waste container tracking and a model-agnostic framework that leverages geometric priors to refine litter segmentation.Our experimental results show that while fine-tuned object detectors achieve reasonable performance in detecting waste containers, baseline tracking methods struggle to accurately estimate their number; however, our proposed heuristics reduce the mean absolute counting error by 79.6%. Similarly, while segmenting amorphous litter is challenging, our geometric-aware strategy improves segmentation mAP by 27%, demonstrating the value of multimodal inputs for this task. Ultimately, StreetView-Waste provides a challenging benchmark to encourage research into real-world perception systems for urban waste management.