Skin cancers are the most cancers diagnosed worldwide, with an estimated > 1.5 million new cases in 2020. Use of computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems for early detection and classification of skin lesions helps reduce skin cancer mortality rates. Inspired by the success of the transformer network in natural language processing (NLP) and the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) in computer vision, we propose an end-to-end CNN transformer hybrid model with a focal loss (FL) function to classify skin lesion images. First, the CNN extracts low-level, local feature maps from the dermoscopic images. In the second stage, the vision transformer (ViT) globally models these features, then extracts abstract and high-level semantic information, and finally sends this to the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) head for classification. Based on an evaluation of three different loss functions, the FL-based algorithm is aimed to improve the extreme class imbalance that exists in the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) 2018 dataset. The experimental analysis demonstrates that impressive results of skin lesion classification are achieved by employing the hybrid model and FL strategy, which shows significantly high performance and outperforms the existing work.

The rapid progress in sensor technology and computational capabilities has significantly improved real-time data collection, enabling precise monitoring of various phenomena and industrial processes. However, the volume and complexity of heterogeneous data present substantial processing challenges. Traditional data-processing techniques, such as data aggregation, filtering, and statistical analysis, are increasingly supplemented by data fusion methods. These methods can be broadly categorised into traditional analytics-based approaches, like the Kalman Filter and Particle Filter, and learning-based approaches, utilising machine learning and deep learning techniques such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). These techniques combine data from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of information, which is critical in number of fields. Despite this, a comprehensive review of learning-based, particularly deep learning-based, data fusion strategies is lacking. This paper presents a thorough review of deep learning-based data fusion methodologies across various fields, examining their evolution over the past five years. It highlights applications in remote sensing, healthcare, industrial fault diagnosis, intelligent transportation, and other domains. The paper categories fusion strategies into early-level, intermediate-level, late-level, and hybrid fusion, emphasising their synergies, challenges, and suitability. It outlines significant advancements, the comparative advantages of deep learning-based methods over traditional approaches, and emerging trends and future directions. To ensure a comprehensive analysis, the review is structured using the ProKnow-C methodology, a rigorous selection process that focuses on relevant literature from recent years.

Skin cancer is one of the most threatening cancers, which spreads to the other parts of the body if not caught and treated early. During the last few years, the integration of deep learning into skin cancer has been a milestone in health care, and dermoscopic images are right at the center of this revolution. This review study focuses on the state-of-the-art automatic diagnosis of skin cancer from dermoscopic images based on deep learning. This work thoroughly explores the existing deep learning and its application in diagnosing dermoscopic images. This study aims to present and summarize the latest methodology in melanoma classification and the techniques to improve this. We discuss advancements in deep learning-based solutions to diagnose skin cancer, along with some challenges and future opportunities to strengthen these automatic systems to support dermatologists and enhance their ability to diagnose skin cancer.

Communication is often considered as the most costly component of a wireless sensor node. As a result, a variety of technologies and protocols aim to reduce the energy consumption for the communication especially in the Internet of Things context. In order to select the best suitable technology for a given use case, a tool that allows the comparison of these options is needed. The goal of this work is to introduce a new modular modeling framework that enables a comparison of various technologies based on analytical calculations. We chose to model the cost for a single data transfer of arbitrary application data amounts in order to provide flexibility regarding the data amount and traffic patterns. The modeling approach covers the stack traversal of application data and thus in comparison to other approaches includes the required protocol overhead directly. By applying our models to different data amounts, we are able to show trade-offs between various technologies and enable comparisons for different scenarios. In addition, our results reveal the impact of design decisions that can help to identify future development challenges.

Object detection for sky surveillance is a challenging problem due to having small objects in a large volume and a constantly changing background which requires high resolution frames. For example, detecting flying birds in wind farms to prevent their collision with the wind turbines. This paper proposes a YOLOv4-based ensemble model for bird detection in grayscale videos captured around wind turbines in wind farms. In order to tackle this problem, we introduce two datasets—(1) Klim and (2) Skagen—collected at two locations in Denmark. We use Klim training set to train three increasingly capable YOLOv4 based models. Model 1 uses YOLOv4 trained on the Klim dataset, Model 2 introduces tiling to improve small bird detection, and the last model uses tiling and temporal stacking and achieves the best mAP values on both Klim and Skagen datasets. We used this model to set up an ensemble detector, which further improves mAP values on both datasets. The three models achieve testing mAP values of 82%, 88%, and 90% on the Klim dataset. mAP values for Model 1 and Model 3 on the Skagen dataset are 60% and 92%. Improving object detection accuracy could mitigate birds’ mortality rate by choosing the locations for such establishment and the turbines location. It can also be used to improve the collision avoidance systems used in wind energy facilities.

Many wireless vision sensor networks (WVSNs) applications are characterized to have a low duty cycling. An individual wireless vision sensor node (VSN) in WVSN is required to complete the tasks as quickly as possible. The execution of the tasks can be speeded up by exploiting the inherited parallelism in the tasks by using a hardware platform such as field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Traditionally, SRAM FPGAs are considered to be inefficient for duty cycled applications. This paper presents a low-complexity, energy-efficient, and reconfigurable VSN architecture based on SRAM FPGA using a design matrix, which includes tasks' partitioning, a low-complexity background subtraction, bilevel coding, and duty cycling. The proposed VSN, referred to as SENTIOF-CAM, has been implemented on a prototype board and energy values of different states are measured for three real applications. The comparison results with existing solutions show that the proposed architecture with SRAM FPGA can achieve energy reduction of up to a factor of 69 as compared with software VSN solutions and approximately similar energy values to that for the FLASH FPGA-based VSN solutions. The lifetime based on measured energy values shows that, for a sample period of 5 min, a 3.2-years lifetime can be achieved with a battery of 37.44-kJ energy. In addition, the proposed solution offers a generic architecture with a smaller design complexity on a hardware reconfigurable platform and offers easy adaptation for a number of applications.