sensors-logo

Journal Browser

Journal Browser

AI-Enhanced Sensor Data Integration and Processing

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Intelligent Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 October 2026 | Viewed by 3370

Editor


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Interests: artificial intelligence; probabilistic data models; computer vision; machine learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid proliferation of high-resolution sensor observations presents unprecedented opportunities for environmental and oceanic sciences, while simultaneously imposing greater computational demands on numerical modeling. This Special Issue focuses on the critical challenge of efficiently assimilating diverse sensor data into dynamical models under acceptable computational costs. We invite contributions that explore AI-driven approaches to enhance data assimilation processes, addressing fundamental bottlenecks in computational efficiency and the mismatch between model physics and observational variables. We particularly focus on addressing two fundamental challenges:

  • Computational bottlenecks

Sensor data assimilation requires multiple runs of PDE solvers in each optimization iteration. The high flux of sensor observations, e.g., high-resolution satellite data, demands numerical 1 models to generate comparable volumes of state variables for correspondence, making forward computation the primary cost source.

  • Observation-to-state variable mapping

Sensor measurements Z(x, t) do not directly correspond to the state variables U(x, t) solved by numerical models. Creating effective linkages that allow observational data to constrain and inform the physical system dynamics requires sophisticated mappings that current empirical approaches handle inadequately, limiting assimilation effectiveness.

We invite researchers to contribute innovative solutions that leverage artificial intelligence to bridge these gaps and advance state-of-the-art technologies in environmental data assimilation.

Dr. Jun Li
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • machine learning surrogate models for accelerating forward operators
  • neural network-based observation operators for sensor data
  • deep learning approaches for variational data assimilation
  • AI-driven ensemble data assimilation techniques
  • hybrid physics-AI models for environmental prediction
  • multi-sensor fusion using AI techniques
  • real-time processing of high-resolution sensor streams
  • quality control and bias correction of sensor observations
  • uncertainty quantification in sensor data assimilation
  • adaptive sensor placement and observation strategies

Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue

  • Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
  • Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
  • Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
  • External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
  • Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.

Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (3 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

18 pages, 11488 KB  
Article
Bridging High-Resolution Environmental Sensor Observations and Process-State Prediction: A Distribution-Shift-Robust Time–Frequency Transformer (FT-Crossformer)
by Yiran Guan, Zhaoxu Yu and Hui Guo
Sensors 2026, 26(16), 5123; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26165123 - 13 Aug 2026
Viewed by 37
Abstract
High-resolution online sensors are now common in environmental process systems, yet turning their non-stationary, heterogeneous observation streams into reliable predictions of the underlying process state remains difficult. The statistical distribution of a sensor stream changes over time, the measured variables do not coincide [...] Read more.
High-resolution online sensors are now common in environmental process systems, yet turning their non-stationary, heterogeneous observation streams into reliable predictions of the underlying process state remains difficult. The statistical distribution of a sensor stream changes over time, the measured variables do not coincide with the state variables of interest, and repeatedly running a mechanistic process model for forward prediction is computationally costly. We present FT-Crossformer, a time–frequency Transformer that acts as a data-driven surrogate between multi-sensor observations and multivariate process-state prediction. To handle distribution shift in the sensor streams, a time-domain distribution-transformation module, together with an inverse-mapping module, performs an affine bias correction that removes per-window non-stationary statistics at the input and restores them at the output, so the gap between training and test distributions is reduced without discarding non-stationary information. We show that this affine correction, including its learnable per-variable scale and shift, acts in the frequency domain on every non-zero frequency component as one common scaling factor that does not depend on the frequency index, so it cannot change the relative magnitudes among the components. A frequency-stability measurement module and a frequency-weighting module therefore re-weight the spectral components of the observation signal so that the stable, task-relevant ones contribute more to the reconstructed signal. The cross-dimension attention of the Crossformer backbone serves as a multi-sensor fusion mechanism that models the dependencies among the measured variables. We validate the method on public benchmark datasets from different domains as a check of generality and, most relevantly, for environmental modeling on two real cases: a wastewater nitrogen-and-phosphorus-removal process and chlorophyll forecasting from an in situ estuary sensor mooring in San Francisco Bay. On the estuary chlorophyll data, which carries a strong train-to-test distribution shift, the full FT-Crossformer demonstrates superior accuracy among the evaluated models at the next-day nowcasting horizon, and an ablation shows that both the time-domain trans- formation and the frequency-domain weighting contribute to this accuracy. FT-Crossformer produces forward predictions from distribution-shifted sensor data with a single fixed-cost forward pass in place of a repeated mechanistic solve, which makes it a practical building block for sensor-data integration and assimilation in environmental process modeling. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI-Enhanced Sensor Data Integration and Processing)
Show Figures

Figure 1

14 pages, 2703 KB  
Article
Decoding Multidimensional Machining Loads: iKIT Wireless Extrasensory Toolholder and Parametric Analysis in Aluminum Cutting
by Qian Qiao, Dawei Guo, Chi-Tat Kwok and Lap Mou Tam
Sensors 2026, 26(13), 4302; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26134302 - 7 Jul 2026
Viewed by 397
Abstract
Smart manufacturing requires real-time monitoring of multidimensional forces at the interface between the tool and workpiece in computer numerical control (CNC) machining. In this study, an innovative iKIT wireless extrasensory toolholder is introduced that is capable of high-fidelity, in situ, high-frequency sensing and [...] Read more.
Smart manufacturing requires real-time monitoring of multidimensional forces at the interface between the tool and workpiece in computer numerical control (CNC) machining. In this study, an innovative iKIT wireless extrasensory toolholder is introduced that is capable of high-fidelity, in situ, high-frequency sensing and monitoring of the cutting force, torque, and two-way bending moments. The hardware design of the system is outlined, highlighting a high-bandwidth miniature wireless transmission method and noncontact power supply and energy storage solution suitable for rotating machining environments. To assess the system performance, comprehensive milling tests were performed on aluminum alloy materials, and the relationship between the process parameters and changes in multidimensional mechanical loads was thoroughly examined. The experimental findings demonstrate that the smart toolholder detects precisely how parameter variations affect the loads. Multidimensional mechanical signals (torque and two-way bending moments) show a strong positive correlation with the feed rate and axial depth of cut, confirming the impact of the material removal rate on the system loads. Conversely, these signals are negatively correlated with spindle speed, accurately reflecting the effects of thermal softening and a reduced friction coefficient in aluminum alloys during high-speed cutting. This study not only offers a dependable hardware framework for integrating miniaturized sensors into toolholders, but also delivers accurate data to support digital twin models and adaptive control in machining processes. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI-Enhanced Sensor Data Integration and Processing)
Show Figures

Figure 1

14 pages, 1785 KB  
Article
DINOv3-Driven Semantic Segmentation for Landslide Mapping in Mountainous Regions
by Zhiyi Dou, Edore Akpokodje, Yuelin He, Yuxin Liu, Zixuan Ni, Chang’an Xu, Muhammad Aslam and Meng Tang
Sensors 2026, 26(2), 406; https://doi.org/10.3390/s26020406 - 8 Jan 2026
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2492
Abstract
Landslide hazard assessment increasingly demands the joint analysis of heterogeneous remote sensing data; however, automating this process remains difficult due to the pronounced resolution and texture discrepancies existing between satellite and aerial sensors. To address these limitations, this study proposes a robust segmentation [...] Read more.
Landslide hazard assessment increasingly demands the joint analysis of heterogeneous remote sensing data; however, automating this process remains difficult due to the pronounced resolution and texture discrepancies existing between satellite and aerial sensors. To address these limitations, this study proposes a robust segmentation framework capable of extracting sensor-robust representations. The framework leverages a DINOv3 transformer encoder and exploits representations from multiple transformer layers to capture complementary visual information, ranging from fine-grained surface textures to global semantic contexts, overcoming the receptive field constraints of conventional CNNs. Experiments on the Longxi satellite dataset achieve a Dice coefficient of 0.96 and an IoU of 0.938, and experiments on the Longxi UAV dataset achieve a Dice coefficient of 0.965 and an IoU of 0.941. These results show consistent segmentation performance on both the Longxi satellite and UAV datasets, despite differences in spatial resolution and surface appearance between acquisition platforms. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue AI-Enhanced Sensor Data Integration and Processing)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop