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Record W4413353468 · doi:10.1016/j.jwpe.2025.108554

Rapid estimation of biosludge polymer demand for dewatering via image classification

2025· article· en· W4413353468 on OpenAlexafffund
Sergio Luna Nino, Aymun Qayume, Torsten Meyer, D. Grant Allen

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Water Process Engineering · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicMicroplastics and Plastic Pollution
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsDewateringEstimationPulp and paper industryEnvironmental scienceArtificial intelligenceComputer scienceChemistryPattern recognition (psychology)Biochemical engineeringProcess engineeringEconomicsEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Applying the optimal polymer dose to biosludge prior to dewatering can help minimize the economic and environmental costs of disposal. However, measuring the polymer demand is a time-intensive process for wastewater treatment plants, and biosludge characteristics vary over time. A novel, rapid image-based polymer demand estimation tool was developed by designing a simple and accessible image capture station and applying transfer learning of an open-source image classifier. Images were captured with a smartphone fixed in an enclosed structure above a biosludge sample dosed with polymer in a 150 mm petri dish. To facilitate collecting the required image database, the entire structure was fastened to an orbital shaker to intermittently apply shake-steps between image capturing that simulate replicates. Using TensorFlow in Python, image databases were constructed and used to retrain EfficientNetV2 to classify images of dosed biosludge as either underdosed, well-dosed, and overdosed. Two image-based models were constructed, one for pulp and paper mill biosludge, and the other for municipal biosludge, which achieved 86 % and 83 % accuracy against an unseen set of images.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.546
Threshold uncertainty score0.221

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.214
Teacher spread0.208 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designBench or experimental
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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