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The SAR system possesses the ability to carry out all-day and all-weather imaging, which is highly valuable in the application of aircraft identification. However, aircraft identification from SAR images still faces great challenges due to speckle noise interference, multiscale problems, and complex background interference. To solve these problems, an efficient bidirectional path multiscale fusion and attention network (EBMA-Net) is proposed in this paper. It employs bidirectional connectivity to fuse the features of aircraft with different scales to perform the accurate detection of aircraft even when the background is highly complex. In the presented EBMA-Net, a module called efficient multiscale channel attention fusion (EMCA) and three parallel squeeze efficient channel attention (SECA) modules are proposed. In the EMCA module, the bidirectional paths are created by stacking upper and lower fusion modules, which effectively integrate shallow detailed features and deep semantic information. So, the detection performance of aircraft at different scales is improved. In the SECA module, the dependency relationship between feature channels is explicitly modeled, which can automatically learn the importance of different channels, prioritize key features, so as to improve the precision and robustness of aircraft identification. In the experiment, the public dataset of aircraft identification (i.e., SAR-AIRcraft-1.0, which is generated from the GF-3 satellite) from high-resolution SAR systems is used, and several other excellent target-detection networks are used for performance comparison, namely, YOLOv5s, YOLOv7, MGCAN, and EBPA2N. According to the results, the average aircraft detection accuracy of EBMA-Net is 91.31%, which is 4.5% higher than YOLOv7; and the false alarm rate is decreased by 5%. Its accuracy in the identification of aircraft can reach 95.6%, which is about 3.7% higher than YOLOv7. Therefore, the EBMA-Net obviously outperforms the other networks for aircraft detection and identification. The proposed EBMA-Net, which can capture the detailed information and better restrain the background interference, could also be used to perform the detection and identification of dense targets with different scales and background from SAR images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In category-level object pose estimation tasks, determining how to mitigate intra-class shape variations and improve pose estimation accuracy for complex objects remains a challenging problem to solve. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new network architecture, LA-Net, to efficiently ascertain object poses from features. Firstly, we extend the 3D graph convolution network architecture by introducing the LS-Layer (Linear Connection Layer), which enables the network to acquire features from different layers and perform multi-scale feature fusion. Secondly, LA-Net employs a novel attention mechanism (PSA) and a Max-Pooling layer to extract local and global geometric information, which enhances the network's ability to perceive object poses. Finally, the proposed LA-Net recovers the rotation information of an object by decoupling the rotation mechanism. The experimental results show that LA-Net can has much better accuracy in object pose estimation compared to the baseline method (HS-Pose). Especially for objects with complex shapes, its performance is 8.2% better for the 10°5 cm metric and 5% better for the 10°2 cm metric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co3O4 has attracted extensive attention as an electrode material for pseudocapacitors due to its simple preparation process and high theoretical capacity (3560 F g−1). Although the experimental specific capacitance is much lower than its theoretical value, in-depth research into its kinetics, which is urgently needed for further performance improvement, is still rarely seen. Here, Co3O4 electrodes with the same morphology but different grain sizes are prepared. The kinetic connection between grain size and electrochemical performance is investigated. It can be found that a smaller Co3O4 grain size is beneficial for immersion in the electrolyte, which can enhance the diffusive capacity. Furthermore, for the first time, using distribution of relaxation times (DRT) calculation, the relationship between the grain size and the reaction activation energy is studied. The results demonstrate that Co3O4 with a small grain size has a low activation energy of the charge transfer reaction and diffusion, which will make the redox reaction and diffusion in the Co3O4 electrode easier, thus leading to the improvement of the electrochemical performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]