A visible-infrared clothes-changing dataset for person re-identification in natural scene

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has been widely used in intelligent surveillance systems, aiming at retrieving specific pedestrian images across different cameras. Although existing person Re-ID methods have achieved inspiring success, there are still limitations in practical monitoring system applications. To narrow the gap with the practical application, we introduce the cross-modality person Re-ID problem in the clothes-changing scene. Meanwhile, we construct the first Visible-Infrared Clothes-Changing (NEU-VICC) dataset, which contained 16632 RGB images and 8374 infrared images of 107 pedestrians. The critical challenge of the cross-modality person Re-ID problem in the clothes-changing scene lies in the vast modality discrepancy and the intra-class discrepancy caused by changing clothes. So, we propose a novel Semantic-Constraint Clothes-Changing Augmentation Network (SC3ANet) based on current cross-modality person Re-ID methods to solve this problem. Specifically, we design a semantic-constraint clothes-changing module that guides the model to learn clothes-irrelevant features by randomly changing pedestrians' clothes. In addition, we devise a dual-granularity constraint loss module to mitigate inter-modality and intra-class differences. Experiments on our NEU-VICC dataset show that the SC3ANet achieves the best results. The dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/VDT-2048/NEU-VICC.</p

Borate-Based Artificial Solid-Electrolyte Interphase Enabling Stable Lithium Metal Anodes

Lithium (Li) metal is considered as the “holy grail” of anode materials for next-generation high energy batteries. However, notorious dendrite growth and interfacial instability could induce irreversible capacity loss and safety issues, limiting the practical application of Li metal anodes. Herein, we develop a novel approach to construct a borate-based artificial solid-electrolyte interphase (designated as B-SEI) through the reaction of metallic Li with triethylamine borane (TEAB). According to our cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) characterization results, the artificial SEI adopts a glass-crystal bilayer structure, which facilitates uniform Li-ion transport and inhibits dendrite growth during Li plating. Benefiting from such an artificial SEI, the Li anode delivers an improved rate performance and prolonged cycle life. The symmetric Li/B-SEI||Li/B-SEI cell can maintain stable cycling for 700 h at a high current density of 3 mA cm–2. The full-cell pairing Li/B-SEI with LiFePO4 only exhibits minimal capacity decay after 500 cycles in a conventional carbonate-based electrolyte. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building a boride-based artificial SEI to stabilize the Li metal anode based on microscopic characterization results and comprehensive electrochemical data, which represents a promising avenue to develop practical Li metal batteries