Embedding the ability of sentiment analysis in smart devices is especially challenging because sentiment analysis relies on deep neural networks, in particular, convolutional neural networks. The paper presents a novel hardware-friendly detector of image polarity, enhanced with the ability of saliency detection. The approach stems from a hardware-oriented design process, which trades off prediction accuracy and computational resources. The eventual solution combines lightweight deep-learning architectures and post-training quantization. Experimental results on standard benchmarks confirmed that the design strategy can infer automatically the salient parts and the polarity of an image with high accuracy. Saliency-based solutions in the literature prove impractical due to their considerable computational costs; the paper shows that the novel design strategy can deploy and perform successfully on a variety of commercial smartphones, yielding real-time performances.

Emotion recognition, among other natural language processing tasks, has greatly benefited from the use of large transformer models. Deploying these models on resource-constrained devices, however, is a major challenge due to their computational cost. In this paper, we show that the combination of large transformers, as high-quality feature extractors, and simple hardware-friendly classifiers based on linear separators can achieve competitive performance while allowing real-time inference and fast training. Various solutions including batch and Online Sequential Learning are analyzed. Additionally, our experiments show that latency and performance can be further improved via dimensionality reduction and pre-training, respectively. The resulting system is implemented on two types of edge device, namely an edge accelerator and two smartphones.

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In the research area of human-robot interactions, the automatic estimation of the mass of a container manipulated by a person leveraging only visual information is a challenging task. The main challenges consist of occlusions, different filling materials and lighting conditions. The mass of an object constitutes key information for the robot to correctly regulate the force required to grasp the container. We propose a single RGB-D camera-based method to locate a manipulated container and estimate its empty mass i.e., independently of the presence of the content. The method first automatically selects a number of candidate containers based on the distance with the fixed frontal view, then averages the mass predictions of a lightweight model to provide the final estimation. Results on the CORSMAL Containers Manipulation dataset show that the proposed method estimates empty container mass obtaining a score of 71.08% under different lighting or filling conditions.