Implementation of Neural Network Models on Resource-Constrained Devices

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 June 2026 | Viewed by 1208

Special Issue Editors

Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FESB), University of Split, 21 000 Split, Croatia
Interests: applied machine learning; real-time data reduction; pattern recognition; neural networks; deep learning
Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture, University of Split, 21 000 Split, Croatia
Interests: applied machine learning; computer vision; estimation algorithms; robotics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Department of Electronics and Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FESB), University of Split, 21 000 Split, Croatia
Interests: applied machine learning; digital design; instrumentation; photovoltaics

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Deep learning, and especially neural networks (NNs), have gained a lot of attention over the past decade. Research on this interesting and constantly developing field has dominated various application areas, from biomedical signal processing to robot-related applications, natural language processing, real-time data reduction, image processing, and pattern recognition. Many different NN models have been developed, outperforming traditional algorithms and avoiding manual feature extraction, making feature extraction from raw data completely automatic. Although there have been remarkable improvements in model accuracy, the application of these models to resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones, microcontrollers, and edge devices, is limited by available memory and processing power.

Therefore, the implementation of NNs on such devices requires making the models as “lighweight” as possible, following the acceptable trade-off between accuracy and complexity. In this Special Issue, we aim to present the latest research on this topic. Classical approaches to network compression and feature reduction using quantization techniques like post-training or quantization-aware training are welcome, but studies exploring other relevant techniques, such as pruning, knowledge distillation, and low-rank factorization are of great interest. Novel approaches for NN compression and hardware implementation of models on edge devices are particularly welcome. Research on deployment techniques for critical hardware components such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is also acceptable.

Topics of interest for original contributions include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Novel techniques for lightweight NN architecture design;
  • Novel NN compression techniques;
  • Efficient hardware deployment of NNs;
  • Implementation and testing of NNs on FPGA devices;
  • Novel feature reduction schemes (including quantization on lower numbers of bits).

Dr. Marina Prvan
Dr. Josip Musić
Dr. Duje Čoko
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • deep learning
  • edge devices
  • neural networks
  • FPGA

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

21 pages, 656 KB  
Article
Acoustic Violence Detection Using Cascade Strategy for Computationally Constrained Scenarios
by Fangfang Zhu-Zhou, Diana Tejera-Berengué, Roberto Gil-Pita, Manuel Utrilla-Manso and Manuel Rosa-Zurera
Electronics 2026, 15(6), 1227; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15061227 - 16 Mar 2026
Viewed by 249
Abstract
Detecting violent content in audio recordings is crucial for public safety, autonomous surveillance, and content moderation, particularly when visual cues are unreliable or unavailable. A resource-aware two-stage cascade system is proposed for acoustic violence detection that combines a lightweight Least Squares Linear Detector [...] Read more.
Detecting violent content in audio recordings is crucial for public safety, autonomous surveillance, and content moderation, particularly when visual cues are unreliable or unavailable. A resource-aware two-stage cascade system is proposed for acoustic violence detection that combines a lightweight Least Squares Linear Detector (LSLD) as a first-stage screener with a trimmed version of YAMNet as a second-stage classifier. A percentile-based forwarding rule controls the fraction of segments routed to the deep stage, turning the accuracy–cost trade-off into an explicit operating parameter for always-on deployment. The approach is evaluated on a publicly released dataset of real-world violent audio augmented with background noise and artificial reverberation. The results in the low-false-alarm regime show that the proposed cascade preserves performance close to a Stage 2-only baseline while substantially reducing average deep-inference workload. An ablation study validates the role of the LSLD as an inexpensive pre-filter, and robustness is assessed under clean, reverberant, and 12 dB noise conditions. Finally, an analytic energy consumption model is provided, which links computational workload to daily energy demand and photovoltaic sizing on ultra-low-power hardware, supporting sustainable off-grid deployment. Full article
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20 pages, 1874 KB  
Article
A Lightweight Multi-Classification Intrusion Detection Model for Edge IoT Networks
by Wei Gao, Mingyue Wang, Yadong Pei, Fangwei Li and Chaonan Wang
Electronics 2026, 15(5), 938; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics15050938 - 25 Feb 2026
Viewed by 472
Abstract
Intrusion detection aims to effectively detect abnormal attacks in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which is crucial for cybersecurity. However, it is difficult for traditional intrusion detection methods to effectively extract data features from traffic data, and most existing models are too complex [...] Read more.
Intrusion detection aims to effectively detect abnormal attacks in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, which is crucial for cybersecurity. However, it is difficult for traditional intrusion detection methods to effectively extract data features from traffic data, and most existing models are too complex to be deployed on edge servers. Addressing this need, this paper proposes a hybrid feature selection method and a lightweight deep learning intrusion detection model. Firstly, the data feature space is reduced using variance filtering, mutual information, and the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, thereby reducing the computational cost of subsequent model training. Then, an intrusion detection model based on a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) is constructed. This model utilizes dilated causal convolutions to effectively capture long-term temporal dependencies in network traffic. Simultaneously, the residual connections are used to mitigate the vanishing gradient problem, making the model easier to train and converge. Finally, experiments are conducted on the newly released Edge-IIoTset dataset. The results show that the proposed feature selection algorithm maintains good detection performance despite a significant reduction in feature dimensionality. Furthermore, compared with other models, the proposed TCN-based approach achieves higher classification accuracy with lower computational overhead, demonstrating its suitability for deployment in resource-constrained edge computing environments. Full article
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