MUMBAI, India, Aug. 31 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202641101049 A) filed by Sri Eshwar College Of Engineering on August 20, 2026, for Real-Time Microplastic Detection System Using Polarization Microscopy And Machine Learning.
Inventors include Dr. K. Kathiresan; Srinivasan. R; Rohith. K; and Sindhuja. S S.
The application for the patent was published on August 28, 2026, under issue no. 35/2026.
Abstract: Microplastic pollution in water environments is becoming a bigger problem for the environment and people’s health. These tiny pieces, which are between 1 and 5000 micrometers in size come from clothes, packages and factories. They can build up in the water the bottom of the water and the animals that live in the water. Current ways to find these microplastics like Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) Raman Spectroscopy and Nile Red fluorescence microscopy are very good at finding them. Need expensive machines, special labs, people who know what they are doing and a lot of time to get results. These problems make it hard to check the water regularly in places that do not have much money or resources. This work is about making an cheap way to find microplastics automatically. It uses crossed polarization microscopy and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to do the job. The system uses the way some plastics act when light passes through them. When you use crossed polarizers the microplastics look bright on a background. A diffuser makes the light even. Does not need any chemicals to color the samples. A digital microscope takes pictures at 500 times zoom. These pictures are looked at by a trained ResNet50 model. It can. Sort microplastics like pieces and threads measure their size and guess how many there are. The system can check a sample in than two minutes. It has around 95% accuracy. It can cut the cost of the equipment by over 95%. This makes it possible to use this method, for checking microplastics in water. It is cheap can be used in places and can be taken out into the field for testing.
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