Accurate and compact convolutional neural network based on stochastic computing

Accelerated construction of stress relief music datasets using CNN and the Mel-scaled spectrogram

Listening to music is a crucial tool for relieving stress and promoting relaxation. However, the limited options available for stress-relief music do not cater to individual preferences, compromising its effectiveness. Traditional methods of curating stress-relief music rely heavily on measuring biological responses, which is time-consuming, expensive, and requires specialized measurement devices. In this paper, a deep learning approach to solve this problem is introduced that explicitly uses convolutional neural networks and provides a more efficient and economical method for generating large datasets of stress-relief music. These datasets are composed of Mel-scaled spectrograms that include essential sound elements (such as frequency, amplitude, and waveform) that can be directly extracted from the music. The trained model demonstrated a test accuracy of 98.7%, and a clinical study indicated that the model-selected music was as effective as researcher-verified music in terms of stress-relieving capacity. This paper underlines the transformative potential of deep learning in addressing the challenge of limited music options for stress relief. More importantly, the proposed method has profound implications for music therapy because it enables a more personalized approach to stress-relief music selection, offering the potential for enhanced emotional well-being.

Reduced-complexity Convolutional Neural Network in the compressed domain

Deep neural networks have achieved outstanding performance in computer vision tasks. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) typically operate in the spatial domain with raw images, but in practice, images are usually stored and transmitted in their compressed representation where JPEG is one of the most widely used encoder. Also, these networks are computationally intensive and slow. This paper proposes performing the learning and inference processes in the compressed domain in order to reduce the computational complexity and improve the speed of popular CNNs. For this purpose, a novel graph-based frequency channel selection method is proposed to identify and select the most important frequency channels. The computational complexity is reduced by retaining the important frequency components and discarding the insignificant ones as well as eliminating the unnecessary layers of the network. Experimental results show that the modified ResNet-50 operating in the compressed domain is up to 70% faster than the spatial-based traditional ResNet-50 while resulting in similar classification accuracy. Moreover, this paper proposes a preprocessing step with partial encoding to improve the resilience to distortions caused by low-quality encoded images. Finally, we show that training a network with highly compressed data can achieve a good classification accuracy with up to 93% reduction in the storage requirements of the training data.

Fully Parallel Stochastic Computing Hardware Implementation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Edge Computing Applications

Edge artificial intelligence (AI) is receiving a tremendous amount of interest from the machine learning community due to the ever-increasing popularization of the Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, the incorporation of AI characteristics to edge computing devices presents the drawbacks of being power and area hungry for typical deep learning techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work, we propose a power-and-area efficient architecture based on the exploitation of the correlation phenomenon in stochastic computing (SC) systems. The proposed architecture solves the challenges that a CNN implementation with SC (SC-CNN) may present, such as the high resources used in binary-to-stochastic conversion, the inaccuracy produced by undesired correlation between signals, and the complexity of the stochastic maximum function implementation. To prove that our architecture meets the requirements of edge intelligence realization, we embed a fully parallel CNN in a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. The results obtained showed a better performance than traditional binary logic and other SC implementations. In addition, we performed a full VLSI synthesis of the proposed design, showing that it presents better overall characteristics than other recently published VLSI architectures.

Autonomous Robotic Manipulation: Real-Time, Deep-Learning Approach for Grasping of Unknown Objects

Recent advancement in vision-based robotics and deep-learning techniques has enabled the use of intelligent systems in a wider range of applications requiring object manipulation. Finding a robust solution for object grasping and autonomous manipulation became the focus of many engineers and is still one of the most demanding problems in modern robotics. This paper presents a full grasping pipeline proposing a real-time data-driven deep-learning approach for robotic grasping of unknown objects using MATLAB and convolutional neural networks. The proposed approach employs RGB-D image data acquired from an eye-in-hand camera centering the object of interest in the field of view using visual servoing. Our approach aims at reducing propagation errors and eliminating the need for complex hand tracking algorithm, image segmentation, or 3D reconstruction. The proposed approach is able to efficiently generate reliable multi-view object grasps regardless of the geometric complexity and physical properties of the object in question. The proposed system architecture enables simple and effective path generation and a real-time tracking control. In addition, our system is modular, reliable, and accurate in both end effector path generation and control. We experimentally justify the efficacy and effectiveness of our overall system on the Barrett Whole Arm Manipulator.