Real-time object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery is critical yet challenging, requiring high accuracy amidst complex scenes with multi-scale and small objects, under stringent onboard computational constraints. While existing methods struggle to balance accuracy and efficiency, we propose RTUAV-YOLO, a family of lightweight models based on YOLOv11 tailored for UAV real-time object detection. First, to mitigate the feature imbalance and progressive information degradation of small objects in current architectures multi-scale processing, we developed a Multi-Scale Feature Adaptive Modulation module (MSFAM) that enhances small-target feature extraction capabilities through adaptive weight generation mechanisms and dual-pathway heterogeneous feature aggregation. Second, to overcome the limitations in contextual information acquisition exhibited by current architectures in complex scene analysis, we propose a Progressive Dilated Separable Convolution Module (PDSCM) that achieves effective aggregation of multi-scale target contextual information through continuous receptive field expansion. Third, to preserve fine-grained spatial information of small objects during feature map downsampling operations, we engineered a Lightweight DownSampling Module (LDSM) to replace the traditional convolutional module. Finally, to rectify the insensitivity of current Intersection over Union (IoU) metrics toward small objects, we introduce the Minimum Point Distance Wise IoU (MPDWIoU) loss function, which enhances small-target localization precision through the integration of distance-aware penalty terms and adaptive weighting mechanisms. Comprehensive experiments on the VisDrone2019 dataset show that RTUAV-YOLO achieves an average improvement of 3.4% and 2.4% in mAP50 and mAP50-95, respectively, compared to the baseline model, while reducing the number of parameters by 65.3%. Its generalization capability for UAV object detection is further validated on the UAVDT and UAVVaste datasets. The proposed model is deployed on a typical airborne platform, Jetson Orin Nano, providing an effective solution for real-time object detection scenarios in actual UAVs.
17 December 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering
At-home rehabilitation for post-stroke patients presents significant challenges, as continuous, personalized care is often limited outside clinical settings. Moreover, the lack of integrated solutions capable of simultaneously monitoring motor recovery and providing intelligent assistance in home environments hampers rehabilitation outcomes. Here, we present a multimodal smart home platform designed for continuous, at-home rehabilitation of post-stroke patients, integrating wearable sensing, ambient monitoring, and adaptive automation. A plantar pressure insole equipped with a machine learning pipeline classifies users into motor recovery stages with up to 94% accuracy, enabling quantitative tracking of walking patterns during daily activities. An optional head-mounted eye-tracking module, together with ambient sensors such as cameras and microphones, supports seamless hands-free control of household devices with an average latency under 1 s with consistent operation. These data streams are fused locally via a hierarchical Internet of Things (IoT) architecture, ensuring low latency and data privacy. An embedded large language model (LLM) agent, Auto-Care, continuously interprets multimodal data to provide real-time interventions—issuing personalized reminders, adjusting environmental conditions, and notifying caregivers. Implemented in a post-stroke context, this integrated smart home platform increased mean user satisfaction from $3.9~\pm ~0.8$ in conventional home environments to $8.4~\pm ~0.6$ with the full system (n = 20). Beyond stroke, the system offers a scalable, patient-centered framework with potential for long-term use in broader neurorehabilitation and aging-in-place applications.
4 March 2026 in IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain computer interface (BCI) systems hold significant promise across diverse applications; however, their performance is compromised by pervasive physiological artifacts that degrade signal fidelity. While current deep neural networks (DNNs) improve artifact rejection, their high computational cost precludes deployment in wearable BCIs systems. Here, we introduce STAND-Net (Spiking Temporal Attention autoeNcoDer Network), a neuromorphic architecture that leverages event-driven spiking neurons to achieve ultra-efficient, high-fidelity EEG artifact removal. STAND-Net combines a spike-convolution encoder-decoder with leaky integrate-and-fire neurons to model spatiotemporal EEG dynamics, a dilation-enhanced residual backbone capturing long-range dependencies, and a spike-rate attention mechanism dynamically localizing artifacts via neuronal firing patterns. The system demonstrates >3.7 dB improvement in signal-to-distortion ratio over state-of-the-art methods across diverse artifacts while consuming 97.98% less power than comparable DNNs. Crucially, downstream BCI classification accuracy increased by 6.64% using STAND-Net-processed signals. This work establishes a neuromorphic framework for low-power and high quality EEG artifact removal in wearable BCI systems.
Robust unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) detection in real low-altitude anti-UAV scenarios remains challenging due to motion blur, extreme illumination, cluttered backgrounds, and tiny target sizes. Most existing UAV detectors rely on RGB imagery, but their performance often degrades severely under these adverse conditions. Event cameras, as a neuromorphic sensing modality, capture motion-sensitive responses with high temporal resolution and thus provide complementary cues for robust UAV detection. However, existing RGB–event fusion detectors usually employ homogeneous feature extraction and generic fusion mechanisms, which are insufficient to handle heterogeneous modality degradation and exploit reliable cross-modal cues. To address this limitation, we propose SMG-UAV, a sparse mutual guided RGB–event fusion network for robust small-UAV detection. The proposed method integrates a hybrid dual-branch backbone for modality-specific representation learning, a Sparse Mutual Guided Bridge for bidirectional sparse cross-modal refinement, and a Selective Gated Pyramid Neck for multiscale enhancement of weak UAV responses. Experiments on the Florence RGB-Event Drone Dataset (FRED) and the Neuromorphic-RGB Drone Detection Dataset (NeRDD) demonstrate that SMG-UAV achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest competing method by an average of 5.2 points in , while delivering stronger robustness under multiple challenging anti-UAV conditions.