A Neural Network-Based Weighted Voting Algorithm for Multi-Target Classification in WSN

Sensors (Basel). 2023 Dec 26;24(1):123. doi: 10.3390/s24010123.

Abstract

One of the most important applications in the wireless sensor networks (WSN) is to classify mobile targets in the monitoring area. In this paper, a neural network(NN)-based weighted voting classification algorithm is proposed on the basis of the NN-based classifier and combined with the idea of voting strategy, which is implemented on the nodes of the WSN monitoring system by means of the "upper training, lower transplantation" approach. The performance of the algorithm is verified by using real-world experimental data, and the results show that the proposed method has a higher accuracy in classifying the target signal features, achieving an average classification accuracy of about 85% when utilizing a deep neural network (DNN) and deep belief network (DBN) as the base classifier. The experiment reveals that the NN-based weighted voting algorithm enhances the target classification accuracy by approximately 5% in comparison to the single NN-based classifier, but the memory and computation time required for the algorithm to run are also increased at the same time. Compared to the FFNN classifier, which exhibited the highest classification accuracy among the four selected methods, the algorithm achieves an improvement of approximately 8.8% in classification accuracy. However, it incurs greater overhead time to run.

Keywords: NN-based classifier; NN-based weighted voting algorithm; WSN; multi-target classification.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.