Image dehazing methods can restore clean images from hazy images and are popularly used as a preprocessing step to improve performance in various image analysis tasks. In recent times, deep learning-based methods have been used to sharply increase the visual quality of restored images, but they require a long computation time. The processing time of image-dehazing methods is one of the important factors to be considered in order not to affect the latency of the main image analysis tasks such as detection and segmentation. We propose an end-to-end network model for real-time image dehazing. We devised a zoomed convolution group that processes computation-intensive operations with low resolution to decrease the processing time of the network model without performance degradation. Additionally, the zoomed convolution group adopts an efficient channel attention module to improve the performance of the network model. Thus, we designed a network model using a zoomed convolution group to progressively recover haze-free images using a coarse-to-fine strategy. By adjusting the sampling ratio and the number of convolution blocks that make up the convolution group, we distributed small and large computational complexities respectively in the early and later operational stages. The experimental results with the proposed method on a public dataset showed a real-time performance comparable to that of another state-of-the-art (SOTA) method. The proposed network’s peak-signal-to-noise ratio was 0.8 dB lower than that of the SOTA method, but the processing speed was 10.4 times faster.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Mobile Trusted Module (MTM) which should satisfy small area and low-power condition. Unlike the general Trusted Platform Module (TPM) for PCs, the MTM, that is to be employed in mobile devices, has very stringent limitations with respect to available power, circuit area and so on. Therefore, a MTM needs the spatially-optimized architecture and design method. We introduce the requirements for a MTM design and then implement a compact and power efficient MTM chip based-on the introduced requirements. The designed MTM can support all the necessary functions for trusted mobile platforms. The MTM chip covers 400 K logic gates and consumes at most 10 mA.

Human activity recognition (HAR), which is important in context awareness services, needs to occur continuously in daily life, owing to which an energy-efficient method is needed. However, because human activities have a longer cycle than HAR methods, which have analysis cycles of a few seconds, continuous classification of human activities using these methods is computationally and energy inefficient. Therefore, we propose segment-level change detection to identify activity change with very low computational complexity. Additionally, a fully convolutional network (FCN) with a high recognition rate is used to classify the activity only when activity change occurs. We compared the accuracy and energy consumption of the proposed method with that of a method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) by using a public dataset on different embedded platforms. The experimental results showed that, although the recognition rate of the proposed FCN model is similar to that of the CNN model, the former requires only 10% of the network parameters of the CNN model. In addition, our experiments to measure the energy consumption on the embedded platforms showed that the proposed method uses as much as 6.5 times less energy than the CNN-based method when only HAR energy consumption is compared.