A Sensor Drift Compensation Method with a Masked Autoencoder Module

Deep learning algorithms are widely used for pattern recognition in electronic noses, which are sensor arrays for gas mixtures. One of the challenges of using electronic noses is sensor drift, which can degrade the accuracy of the system over time, even if it is initially trained to accurately estimate concentrations from sensor data. In this paper, an effective drift compensation method is introduced that adds sensor drift information during training of a neural network that estimates gas concentrations. This is achieved by concatenating a calibration feature vector with sensor data and using this as an input to the neural network. The calibration feature vector is generated via a masked-autoencoder-based feature extractor trained with transfer samples, and acts as a prompt to convey sensor drift information. Our method is tested on a 3-year gas sensor array drift dataset, showing that a neural network using our method performs better than other models, including a network with additional fine tuning, demonstrating that our method is efficient at compensating for sensor drift. In this study, the effectiveness of using prompts for network training is confirmed, which better compensates for drifts in new sensor signals than network fine-tuning.