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Title: Cognition at the Point of Sensing

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1668459· OSTI ID:1668459
 [1];  [1];  [1]
  1. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

Over the last 15 years, compressive sensing techniques have been developed which have the potential to greatly reduce the amount of data collected by systems while preserving the amount of information obtained. A cost of this efficiency is that a computationally-intensive optimization routine must be used to put the sensed data into a form that a person can interpret. At the same time, machine learning techniques have experienced tremendous growth as well. Machines have demonstrated the ability learn how to effectively perform tasks such as detection and classification at speeds much faster than humanly possible. Our goal in this project was to study the feasibility of using compressive sensing systems "at the edge." That is, how can compressive sensing sensors be deployed such that information is created at the remote sensor rather than sending raw data to a central processing location? Studies were performed to analyze whether machine learning could be done on the compressively sensed data in its raw form. If a machine is performing the task, is it possible to do so without putting the data into a human interpretable form? We show that this is possible for some systems, in particular a compressive sensing snapshot imaging spectrometer. Machine learning tasks were demonstrated to be more effective and more robust to noise when the machine learning algorithm worked on data in its raw form. This system is shown to outperform a traditional spectrometer. Techniques for reducing the complexity of the reconstruction routine were also analyzed. Techniques for such as data regularization, deep neural networks, and matrix completion were studied and shown to have benefits over traditional reconstruction techniques. In this project we showed that compressive sensing sensors are indeed feasible at the edge. As always, sensors and algorithms must be carefully tuned to work in the constrained environment. In this project we developed tools and techniques to enable those analyses.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000; NA0003525
OSTI ID:
1668459
Report Number(s):
SAND-2020-9671; 690872
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English