3D object detection in LiDAR point clouds has been extensively used in autonomous driving, intelligent robotics, and augmented reality. Although the one-stage 3D detector has satisfactory training and inference speed, there are still some performance problems due to insufficient utilization of bird’s eye view (BEV) information. In this paper, a new backbone network is proposed to complete the cross-layer fusion of multi-scale BEV feature maps, which makes full use of various information for detection. Specifically, our proposed backbone network can be divided into a coarse branch and a fine branch. In the coarse branch, we use the pyramidal feature hierarchy (PFH) to generate multi-scale BEV feature maps, which retain the advantages of different levels and serves as the input of the fine branch. In the fine branch, our proposed pyramid splitting and aggregation (PSA) module deeply integrates different levels of multi-scale feature maps, thereby improving the expressive ability of the final features. Extensive experiments on the challenging KITTI-3D benchmark show that our method has better performance in both 3D and BEV object detection compared with some previous state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results with average precision (AP) prove the effectiveness of our network.

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Communications industry has remarkably changed with the development of fifth-generation cellular networks. Image, as an indispensable component of communication, has attracted wide attention. Thus, finding a suitable approach to assess image quality is important. Therefore, we propose a deep learning model for image quality assessment (IQA) based on explicit-implicit dual stream network. We use frequency domain features of kurtosis based on wavelet transform to represent explicit features and spatial features extracted by convolutional neural network (CNN) to represent implicit features. Thus, we constructed an explicit-implicit (EI) parallel deep learning model, namely, EI-IQA model. The EI-IQA model is based on the VGGNet that extracts the spatial domain features. On this basis, the number of network layers of VGGNet is reduced by adding the parallel wavelet kurtosis value frequency domain features. Thus, the training parameters and the sample requirements decline. We verified, by cross-validation of different databases, that the wavelet kurtosis feature fusion method based on deep learning has a more complete feature extraction effect and a better generalisation ability. Thus, the method can simulate the human visual perception system better, and subjective feelings become closer to the human eye. The source code about the proposed EI-IQA model is available on github https://github.com/jacob6/EI-IQA.

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In this study, detection and three-dimensional (3D) imaging of lightning plasma channels are presented using radar interferometry. Experiments were carried out in Leshan, China with a 48.2 MHz VHF radar configured with an interferometric antenna array. The typical characteristics of lightning echoes are studied in the form of amplitude, phase, and doppler spectra derived from the raw in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) data. In addition, the 3D structure of lightning channels is reconstructed using the interferometry technique. The localization results of lightning are verified with the locating results of lightning detection networks operating at VLF ranges, which indicate the feasibility of using VHF radar for lightning mapping. The interpretation of the observational results is complicated by the dendric structure of lightning channel and the overlap between passive electromagnetic radiations and return echoes. Nevertheless, some parts of the characteristics of lightning are still evident. The observational result of return echoes shows good consistency with the overdense assumption of lightning channels. The transition from the overdense channel to the underdense channel in the form of amplitude and phase is clearly observed. This technique is very promising to reveal the typical characteristics of lightning return echoes and structure of lightning propagation processes.