Wearable health monitoring systems have gained considerable interest in recent years owing to their tremendous promise for personal portable health watching and remote medical practices. The sensors with excellent flexibility and stretchability are crucial components that can provide health monitoring systems with the capability of continuously tracking physiological signals of human body without conspicuous uncomfortableness and invasiveness. The signals acquired by these sensors, such as body motion, heart rate, breath, skin temperature and metabolism parameter, are closely associated with personal health conditions. This review attempts to summarize the recent progress in flexible and stretchable sensors, concerning the detected health indicators, sensing mechanisms, functional materials, fabrication strategies, basic and desired features. The potential challenges and future perspectives of wearable health monitoring system are also briefly discussed.

Deep learning has attracted increasing attention across a number of disciplines in recent years. In the field of remote sensing, ship detection based on deep learning for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is replacing traditional methods as a mainstream research method. The multiple scales of ship objects make the detection of ship targets a challenging task in SAR images. This paper proposes a new methodology for better detection of multi-scale ship objects in SAR images, which is based on YOLOv5 with a small model size (YOLOv5s), namely the multi-scale ship detection network (MSSDNet). We construct two modules in MSSDNet: the CSPMRes2 (Cross Stage Partial network with Modified Res2Net) module for improving feature representation capability and the FC-FPN (Feature Pyramid Network with Fusion Coefficients) module for fusing feature maps adaptively. Firstly, the CSPMRes2 module introduces modified Res2Net (MRes2) with a coordinate attention module (CAM) for multi-scale features extraction in scale dimension, then the CSPMRes2 module will be used as a basic module in the depth dimension of the MSSDNet backbone. Thus, our backbone of MSSDNet has the capabilities of features extraction in both depth and scale dimensions. In the FC-FPN module, we set a learnable fusion coefficient for each feature map participating in fusion, which helps the FC-FPN module choose the best features to fuse for multi-scale objects detection tasks. After the feature fusion, we pass the output through the CSPMRes2 module for better feature representation. The performance evaluation for this study is conducted using an RTX2080Ti GPU, and two different datasets: SSDD and SARShip are used. These experiments on SSDD and SARShip datasets confirm that MSSDNet leads to superior multi-scale ship detection compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, in comparisons of network model size and inference time, our MSSDNet also has huge advantages with related methods.

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) is a challenging task since it identifies the anomaly targets without prior knowledge. In recent years, deep learning methods have emerged as one of the most popular algorithms in the HAD. These methods operate on the assumption that the background is well reconstructed while anomalies cannot, and the degree of anomaly for each pixel is represented by reconstruction errors. However, most approaches treat all background pixels of a hyperspectral image (HSI) as one type of ground object. This assumption does not always hold in practical scenes, making it difficult to distinguish between backgrounds and anomalies effectively. To address this issue, a novel deep feature aggregation network (DFAN) is proposed in this paper, and it develops a new paradigm for HAD to represent multiple patterns of backgrounds. The DFAN adopts an adaptive aggregation model, which combines the orthogonal spectral attention module with the background-anomaly category statistics module. This allows effective utilization of spectral and spatial information to capture the distribution of the background and anomaly. To optimize the proposed DFAN better, a novel multiple aggregation separation loss is designed, and it is based on the intra-similarity and inter-difference from the background and anomaly. The constraint function reduces the potential anomaly representation and strengthens the potential background representation. Additionally, the extensive experiments on the six real hyperspectral datasets demonstrate that the proposed DFAN achieves superior performance for HAD. The code is available at https://github.com/ChengXi-1217/DFAN-HAD.

Field programmable gate array (FPGA) is widely considered as a promising platform for convolutional neural network (CNN) acceleration. However, the large numbers of parameters of CNNs cause heavy computing and memory burdens for FPGA-based CNN implementation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an optimized compression strategy, and realizes an accelerator based on FPGA for CNNs. Firstly, a reversed-pruning strategy is proposed which reduces the number of parameters of AlexNet by a factor of 13× without accuracy loss on the ImageNet dataset. Peak-pruning is further introduced to achieve better compressibility. Moreover, quantization gives another 4× with negligible loss of accuracy. Secondly, an efficient storage technique, which aims for the reduction of the whole overhead cache of the convolutional layer and the fully connected layer, is presented respectively. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is verified by an accelerator implemented on a Xilinx ZCU104 evaluation board. By improving existing pruning techniques and the storage format of sparse data, we significantly reduce the size of AlexNet by 28×, from 243 MB to 8.7 MB. In addition, the overall performance of our accelerator achieves 9.73 fps for the compressed AlexNet. Compared with the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms, our implementation achieves 182.3× and 1.1× improvements in latency and throughput, respectively, on the convolutional (CONV) layers of AlexNet, with an 822.0× and 15.8× improvement for energy efficiency, separately. This novel compression strategy provides a reference for other neural network applications, including CNNs, long short-term memory (LSTM), and recurrent neural networks (RNNs).

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved milestones in object detection of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Recently, vision transformers and their variants have shown great promise in detection tasks. However, ship detection in SAR images remains a substantial challenge because of the characteristics of strong scattering, multi-scale, and complex backgrounds of ship objects in SAR images. This paper proposes an enhancement Swin transformer detection network, named ESTDNet, to complete the ship detection in SAR images to solve the above problems. We adopt the Swin transformer of Cascade-R-CNN (Cascade R-CNN Swin) as a benchmark model in ESTDNet. Based on this, we built two modules in ESTDNet: the feature enhancement Swin transformer (FESwin) module for improving feature extraction capability and the adjacent feature fusion (AFF) module for optimizing feature pyramids. Firstly, the FESwin module is employed as the backbone network, aggregating contextual information about perceptions before and after the Swin transformer model using CNN. It uses single-point channel information interaction as the primary and local spatial information interaction as the secondary for scale fusion based on capturing visual dependence through self-attention, which improves spatial-to-channel feature expression and increases the utilization of ship information from SAR images. Secondly, the AFF module is a weighted selection fusion of each high-level feature in the feature pyramid with its adjacent shallow-level features using learnable adaptive weights, allowing the ship information of SAR images to be focused on the feature maps at more scales and improving the recognition and localization capability for ships in SAR images. Finally, the ablation study conducted on the SSDD dataset validates the effectiveness of the two components proposed in the ESTDNet detector. Moreover, the experiments executed on two public datasets consisting of SSDD and SARShip demonstrate that the ESTDNet detector outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, which provides a new idea for ship detection in SAR images.

Sparse representation (SR)-based approaches and collaborative representation (CR)-based methods are proved to be effective to detect the anomalies in a hyperspectral image (HSI). Nevertheless, the existing methods for achieving hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) generally only consider one of them, failing to comprehensively exploit them to further promote the detection performance. To address the issue, a novel HAD method, which integrates both sparse representation and collaborative representation (SRCR), is proposed in this paper. To be specific, a SR model, whose overcomplete dictionary is generated by means of the density-based clustering algorithm and superpixel segmen-tation method, is firstly constructed for each pixel in an HSI. Then, for each pixel in an HSI, the used atoms in SR model are sifted to form the background dictionary corresponding to the CR model. To fully exploit both SR and CR information, we further combine the residual features obtained from both SR and CR model by the nonlinear transformation function to generate the response map. Finally, to preserve contour information of the objects, a post-processing operation with guided filter is imposed into the response map to acquire the detection result. Experiments conducted on simulated and real data sets demonstrate that the proposed SRCR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.