Utilizing Multimodal Logic Fusion to Identify the Types of Food Waste Sources

It is a challenge to identify food waste sources in all-weather industrial environments, as variable lighting conditions can compromise the effectiveness of visual recognition models. This study proposes and validates a robust, interpretable, and adaptive multimodal logic fusion method in which sensor dominance is dynamically assigned based on real-time illuminance intensity. The method comprises two foundational components: (1) a lightweight MobileNetV3 + EMA model for image recognition; and (2) an audio model employing Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for feature extraction and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for classification. The key contribution of this system lies in its environment-aware conditional logic. The image model MobileNetV3 + EMA achieves an accuracy of 99.46% within the optimal brightness range (120–240 cd m−2), significantly outperforming the audio model. However, its performance degrades significantly outside the optimal range, while the audio model maintains an illumination-independent accuracy of 0.80, a recall of 0.78, and an F1 score of 0.80. When light intensity falls below the threshold of 84 cd m−2, the audio recognition results take precedence. This strategy ensures robust classification accuracy under variable environmental conditions, preventing model failure. Validated on an independent test set, the fusion method achieves an overall accuracy of 90.25%, providing an interpretable and resilient solution for real-world industrial deployment.