Node deployment is one of the fundamental tasks for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) where the deployment strategy supports many fundamental network services, such as network topology control, routing, and boundary detection. Due to the complex deployment environment in three-dimensional (3D) space and unique characteristics of underwater acoustic channel, many factors need to be considered specifically during the deployment of UASNs. Thus, deployment issues in UASNs are significantly different from those of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Node deployment for UASNs is an attractive research topic upon which a large number of algorithms have been proposed recently. This paper seeks to provide an overview of the most recent advances of deployment algorithms in UASNs while pointing out the open issues. In this paper, the deployment algorithms are classified into three categories based on the mobility of sensor nodes, namely, (I) static deployment, (II) self-adjustment deployment, and (III) movement-assisted deployment. The differences of the representative algorithms in aspects of sensor node types, computation complexity, energy consumption, deployment objectives, and so forth, are discussed and investigated in detail.

As a typical deep-learning model, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be exploited to automatically extract features from images using the hierarchical structure inspired by mammalian visual system. For image classification tasks, traditional CNN models employ the softmax function for classification. However, owing to the limited capacity of the softmax function, there are some shortcomings of traditional CNN models in image classification. To deal with this problem, a new method combining Biomimetic Pattern Recognition (BPR) with CNNs is proposed for image classification. BPR performs class recognition by a union of geometrical cover sets in a high-dimensional feature space and therefore can overcome some disadvantages of traditional pattern recognition. The proposed method is evaluated on three famous image classification benchmarks, that is, MNIST, AR, and CIFAR-10. The classification accuracies of the proposed method for the three datasets are 99.01%, 98.40%, and 87.11%, respectively, which are much higher in comparison with the other four methods in most cases.

Sidescan sonar image segmentation is a very important issue in underwater object detection and recognition. In this paper, a robust and fast method for sidescan sonar image segmentation is proposed, which deals with both speckle noise and intensity inhomogeneity that may cause considerable difficulties in image segmentation. The proposed method integrates the nonlocal means-based speckle filtering (NLMSF), coarse segmentation using k -means clustering, and fine segmentation using an improved region-scalable fitting (RSF) model. The NLMSF is used before the segmentation to effectively remove speckle noise while preserving meaningful details such as edges and fine features, which can make the segmentation easier and more accurate. After despeckling, a coarse segmentation is obtained by using k -means clustering, which can reduce the number of iterations. In the fine segmentation, to better deal with possible intensity inhomogeneity, an edge-driven constraint is combined with the RSF model, which can not only accelerate the convergence speed but also avoid trapping into local minima. The proposed method has been successfully applied to both noisy and inhomogeneous sonar images. Experimental and comparative results on real and synthetic sonar images demonstrate that the proposed method is robust against noise and intensity inhomogeneity, and is also fast and accurate.

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