A Neural Network-Based Real-time Casing Collar Recognition System for Downhole Instruments

Accurate downhole positioning is critical in oil and gas operations but is often compromised by signal degradation in traditional surface-based Casing Collar Locator (CCL) monitoring. To address this, we present an in-situ, real-time collar recognition system using embedded neural network. We introduce lightweight "Collar Recognition Nets" (CRNs) optimized for resource-constrained ARM Cortex-M7 microprocessors. By leveraging temporal and depthwise separable convolutions, our most compact model reduces computational complexity to just 8,208 MACs while maintaining an F1 score of 0.972. Hardware validation confirms an average inference latency of 343.2 μs, demonstrating that robust, autonomous signal processing is feasible within the severe power and space limitations of downhole instrumentation.

AUDRON: A Deep Learning Framework with Fused Acoustic Signatures for Drone Type Recognition

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are increasingly used across diverse domains, including logistics, agriculture, surveillance, and defense. While these systems provide numerous benefits, their misuse raises safety and security concerns, making effective detection mechanisms essential. Acoustic sensing offers a low-cost and non-intrusive alternative to vision or radar-based detection, as drone propellers generate distinctive sound patterns. This study introduces AUDRON (AUdio-based Drone Recognition Network), a hybrid deep learning framework for drone sound detection, employing a combination of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) spectrograms processed with convolutional neural networks (CNNs), recurrent layers for temporal modeling, and autoencoder-based representations. Feature-level fusion integrates complementary information before classification. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that AUDRON effectively differentiates drone acoustic signatures from background noise, achieving high accuracy while maintaining generalizability across varying conditions. AUDRON achieves 98.51 percent and 97.11 percent accuracy in binary and multiclass classification. The results highlight the advantage of combining multiple feature representations with deep learning for reliable acoustic drone detection, suggesting the framework's potential for deployment in security and surveillance applications where visual or radar sensing may be limited.

Pace: Physics-Aware Attentive Temporal Convolutional Network for Battery Health Estimation

Batteries are critical components in modern energy systems such as electric vehicles and power grid energy storage. Effective battery health management is essential for battery system safety, cost-efficiency, and sustainability. In this paper, we propose Pace, a physics-aware attentive temporal convolutional network for battery health estimation. Pace integrates raw sensor measurements with battery physics features derived from the equivalent circuit model. We develop three battery-specific modules, including dilated temporal blocks for efficient temporal encoding, chunked attention blocks for context modeling, and a dual-head output block for fusing short- and long-term battery degradation patterns. Together, the modules enable Pace to predict battery health accurately and efficiently in various battery usage conditions. In a large public dataset, Pace performs much better than existing models, achieving an average performance improvement of 6.5 and 2.0x compared to two best-performing baseline models. We further demonstrate its practical viability with a real-time edge deployment on a Raspberry Pi. These results establish Pace as a practical and high-performance solution for battery health analytics.

Signal-SGN++: Topology-Enhanced Time-Frequency Spiking Graph Network for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) demonstrate strong capability in modeling skeletal topology for action recognition, yet their dense floating-point computations incur high energy costs. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), characterized by event-driven and sparse activation, offer energy efficiency but remain limited in capturing coupled temporal-frequency and topological dependencies of human motion. To bridge this gap, this article proposes Signal-SGN++, a topology-aware spiking graph framework that integrates structural adaptivity with time-frequency spiking dynamics. The network employs a backbone composed of 1D Spiking Graph Convolution (1D-SGC) and Frequency Spiking Convolution (FSC) for joint spatiotemporal and spectral feature extraction. Within this backbone, a Topology-Shift Self-Attention (TSSA) mechanism is embedded to adaptively route attention across learned skeletal topologies, enhancing graph-level sensitivity without increasing computational complexity. Moreover, an auxiliary Multi-Scale Wavelet Transform Fusion (MWTF) branch decomposes spiking features into multi-resolution temporal-frequency representations, wherein a Topology-Aware Time-Frequency Fusion (TATF) unit incorporates structural priors to preserve topology-consistent spectral fusion. Comprehensive experiments on large-scale benchmarks validate that Signal-SGN++ achieves superior accuracy-efficiency trade-offs, outperforming existing SNN-based methods and achieving competitive results against state-of-the-art GCNs under substantially reduced energy consumption.

Explainable Transformer-CNN Fusion for Noise-Robust Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) systems often degrade in performance when exposed to the unpredictable acoustic interference found in real-world environments. Additionally, the opacity of deep learning models hinders their adoption in trust-sensitive applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hybrid Transformer-CNN framework that unifies the contextual modeling of Wav2Vec 2.0 with the spectral stability of 1D-Convolutional Neural Networks. Our dual-stream architecture processes raw waveforms to capture long-range temporal dependencies while simultaneously extracting noise-resistant spectral features (MFCC, ZCR, RMSE) via a custom Attentive Temporal Pooling mechanism. We conducted extensive validation across four diverse benchmark datasets: RAVDESS, TESS, SAVEE, and CREMA-D. To rigorously test robustness, we subjected the model to non-stationary acoustic interference using real-world noise profiles from the SAS-KIIT dataset. The proposed framework demonstrates superior generalization and state-of-the-art accuracy across all datasets, significantly outperforming single-branch baselines under realistic environmental interference. Furthermore, we address the ``black-box" problem by integrating SHAP and Score-CAM into the evaluation pipeline. These tools provide granular visual explanations, revealing how the model strategically shifts attention between temporal and spectral cues to maintain reliability in the presence of complex environmental noise.

A Spatio-Temporal Hybrid Quantum-Classical Graph Convolutional Neural Network Approach for Urban Taxi Destination Prediction

We propose a Hybrid Spatio-Temporal Quantum Graph Convolutional Network (H-STQGCN) algorithm by combining the strengths of quantum computing and classical deep learning to predict the taxi destination within urban road networks. Our algorithm consists of two branches: spatial processing and time evolution. Regarding the spatial processing, the classical module encodes the local topological features of the road network based on the GCN method, and the quantum module is designed to map graph features onto parameterized quantum circuits through a differentiable pooling layer. The time evolution is solved by integrating multi-source contextual information and capturing dynamic trip dependencies on the classical TCN theory. Finally, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the current methods in terms of prediction accuracy and stability, validating the unique advantages of the quantum-enhanced mechanism in capturing high-dimensional spatial dependencies.

Insider Threat Detection Using GCN and Bi-LSTM with Explicit and Implicit Graph Representations

Insider threat detection (ITD) is challenging due to the subtle and concealed nature of malicious activities performed by trusted users. This paper proposes a post-hoc ITD framework that integrates explicit and implicit graph representations with temporal modelling to capture complex user behaviour patterns. An explicit graph is constructed using predefined organisational rules to model direct relationships among user activities. To mitigate noise and limitations in this hand-crafted structure, an implicit graph is learned from feature similarities using the Gumbel-Softmax trick, enabling the discovery of latent behavioural relationships. Separate Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) process the explicit and implicit graphs to generate node embeddings, which are concatenated and refined through an attention mechanism to emphasise threat-relevant features. The refined representations are then passed to a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) network to capture temporal dependencies in user behaviour. Activities are flagged as anomalous when their probability scores fall below a predefined threshold. Extensive experiments on CERT r5.2 and r6.2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods. On r5.2, the model achieves an AUC of 98.62, a detection rate of 100%, and a false positive rate of 0.05. On the more challenging r6.2 dataset, it attains an AUC of 88.48, a detection rate of 80.15%, and a false positive rate of 0.15, highlighting the effectiveness of combining graph-based and temporal representations for robust ITD.

Real-Time American Sign Language Recognition Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks and LSTM: Architecture, Training, and Deployment

This paper presents a real-time American Sign Language (ASL) recognition system utilizing a hybrid deep learning architecture combining 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNN) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The system processes webcam video streams to recognize word-level ASL signs, addressing communication barriers for over 70 million deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals worldwide. Our architecture leverages 3D convolutions to capture spatial-temporal features from video frames, followed by LSTM layers that model sequential dependencies inherent in sign language gestures. Trained on the WLASL dataset (2,000 common words), ASL-LEX lexical database (~2,700 signs), and a curated set of 100 expert-annotated ASL signs, the system achieves F1-scores ranging from 0.71 to 0.99 across sign classes. The model is deployed on AWS infrastructure with edge deployment capability on OAK-D cameras for real-time inference. We discuss the architecture design, training methodology, evaluation metrics, and deployment considerations for practical accessibility applications.

SSCATeR: Sparse Scatter-Based Convolution Algorithm with Temporal Data Recycling for Real-Time 3D Object Detection in LiDAR Point Clouds

This work leverages the continuous sweeping motion of LiDAR scanning to concentrate object detection efforts on specific regions that receive a change in point data from one frame to another. We achieve this by using a sliding time window with short strides and consider the temporal dimension by storing convolution results between passes. This allows us to ignore unchanged regions, significantly reducing the number of convolution operations per forward pass without sacrificing accuracy. This data reuse scheme introduces extreme sparsity to detection data. To exploit this sparsity, we extend our previous work on scatter-based convolutions to allow for data reuse, and as such propose Sparse Scatter-Based Convolution Algorithm with Temporal Data Recycling (SSCATeR). This operation treats incoming LiDAR data as a continuous stream and acts only on the changing parts of the point cloud. By doing so, we achieve the same results with as much as a 6.61-fold reduction in processing time. Our test results show that the feature maps output by our method are identical to those produced by traditional sparse convolution techniques, whilst greatly increasing the computational efficiency of the network.

Assessing Neuromorphic Computing for Fingertip Force Decoding from Electromyography

High-density surface electromyography (HD-sEMG) provides a noninvasive neural interface for assistive and rehabilitation control, but mapping neural activity to user motor intent remains challenging. We assess a spiking neural network (SNN) as a neuromorphic architecture against a temporal convolutional network (TCN) for decoding fingertip force from motor-unit (MU) firing derived from HD-sEMG. Data were collected from a single participant (10 trials) with two forearm electrode arrays; MU activity was obtained via FastICA-based decomposition, and models were trained on overlapping windows with end-to-end causal convolutions. On held-out trials, the TCN achieved 4.44% MVC RMSE (Pearson r = 0.974) while the SNN achieved 8.25% MVC (r = 0.922). While the TCN was more accurate, we view the SNN as a realistic neuromorphic baseline that could close much of this gap with modest architectural and hyperparameter refinements.