Detection of Wastewater Pollution through Natural Language Generation with a Low-Cost Sensing Platform

The detection of contaminants in several environments (e.g., air, water, sewage systems) is of paramount importance to protect people and predict possible dangerous circumstances. Most works do this using classical Machine Learning tools that act on the acquired measurement data. This paper introduces two main elements: a low-cost platform to acquire, pre-process, and transmit data to classify contaminants in wastewater; and a novel classification approach to classify contaminants in wastewater, based on deep learning and the transformation of raw sensor data into natural language metadata. The proposed solution presents clear advantages against state-of-the-art systems in terms of higher effectiveness and reasonable efficiency. The main disadvantage of the proposed approach is that it relies on knowing the injection time, i.e., the instant in time when the contaminant is injected into the wastewater. For this reason, the developed system also includes a finite state machine tool able to infer the exact time instant when the substance is injected. The entire system is presented and discussed in detail. Furthermore, several variants of the proposed processing technique are also presented to assess the sensitivity to the number of used samples and the corresponding promptness/computational burden of the system. The lowest accuracy obtained by our technique is 91.4%, which is significantly higher than the 81.0% accuracy reached by the best baseline method.