GP-VTON: Towards General Purpose Virtual Try-on via Collaborative Local-Flow Global-Parsing Learning

Image-based Virtual Try-ON aims to transfer an in-shop garment onto a specific person. Existing methods employ a global warping module to model the anisotropic deformation for different garment parts, which fails to preserve the semantic information of different parts when receiving challenging inputs (e.g, intricate human poses, difficult garments). Moreover, most of them directly warp the input garment to align with the boundary of the preserved region, which usually requires texture squeezing to meet the boundary shape constraint and thus leads to texture distortion. The above inferior performance hinders existing methods from real-world applications. To address these problems and take a step towards real-world virtual try-on, we propose a General-Purpose Virtual Try-ON framework, named GP-VTON, by developing an innovative Local-Flow Global-Parsing (LFGP) warping module and a Dynamic Gradient Truncation (DGT) training strategy. Specifically, compared with the previous global warping mechanism, LFGP employs local flows to warp garments parts individually, and assembles the local warped results via the global garment parsing, resulting in reasonable warped parts and a semantic-correct intact garment even with challenging inputs.On the other hand, our DGT training strategy dynamically truncates the gradient in the overlap area and the warped garment is no more required to meet the boundary constraint, which effectively avoids the texture squeezing problem. Furthermore, our GP-VTON can be easily extended to multi-category scenario and jointly trained by using data from different garment categories. Extensive experiments on two high-resolution benchmarks demonstrate our superiority over the existing state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, The IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR

Green tea catechin prevents oxidative stress-regulated autophagy and apoptosis signaling, and inhibits tenderness in postmortem bovine longissimus thoracis et lumborum muscle

Although green tea catechin has been reported to be an antioxidant and preservative in meat, the extent to which it affects the tenderization of bovine muscle remains largely unknown. This study seeks to evaluate the effect of catechin on the interplay between apoptosis and autophagy, and subsequently, the development of bovine muscle tenderness. The results indicate that catechin significantly alleviated oxidative stress. A concomitant reduction of autophagic markers LC3-II/LC3-I ratio, Beclin-1, and Atg7 levels were caused by catechin. Besides, aforementioned autophagy inhibition was further augmented by PI3K/Akt/mTOR activation. Additionally, catechin protected against mitochondrial dysfunction and inhibited mitochondria-dependent caspase apoptosis pathway. Furthermore, there was a reciprocal inhibition between autophagy and apoptosis. Ultimately, tenderness at 24 and 120 h, an increase in the gap between muscle fiber bundles, and disintegration of myofibrillar architectures were all inhibited by catechin. Therefore, despite alleviating oxidative stress, catechin may hamper tenderization pattern of postmortem bovine muscle

Influence of different energetic plasticizers on the performance of NC-RDX nitramine gun propellants

Energetic plasticizers are an essential component of propellants and have a significant impact on their performance, such as energy, combustion, and mechanics. Therefore, there is significant practical value in understanding how plasticizers affect the performance of propellants. In this work, the glass transition temperatures of several energetic plasticizers were compared. By adding energetic plasticizers with good compatibility with the propellant and a low glass transition temperature to the propellant, nitramine gun propellants containing different energetic plasticizers were prepared through a semi-solvent method. The compatibility, thermal behavior, phase structure, composition, mechanical properties, energy, and combustion performance of the nitramine gun propellants were characterized. The influence of plasticizers on the phase structure of the propellant and its mechanism on the combustion performance of the propellant were discussed. Energetic plasticizers GAPE, DNPH, and BuNENA have good compatibility and chemical stability with NC-RDX and display good plasticization. GAPE–NC–RDX, DNPH–NC–RDX, and BuNENA–NC–RDX propellants exhibit stable combustion performance at −40 °C, 20 °C, and 50 °C. Compared with the nitramine gun propellant plasticized with NG, the impact strength of the propellant plasticized with DNPH and BuNENA increased by 108.1 % and 17.2 % at −40 °C, respectively. This work offers a solution to improve the phase structure, mechanical properties, and combustion stability of heterogeneous gun propellants and provides a way to suppress the excessive burning rate and flame temperature of propellants

Mechanism of the anisotropic nitroguanidine crystal arrangement on triple-base propellant failure by impact and strategy of structural enhancement

Nitroguanidine (NQ) in solvent-based triple-base propellants (STP) has a propensity to peel off and detach from the matrix, leading to significant defects, such as interface debonding within the propellant’s microstructure. This ultimately results in reduced and unstable mechanical properties. To address this critical issue, an efficient and eco-friendly manufacturing process was employed to successfully produce solventless triple-base propellants (SLTPs) as a comparison to conventional STPs. SLTP samples exhibit a mutually supportive three-dimensional spatial structure, with NQ crystals within the propellant matrix more securely bonded to the interface. They also demonstrate higher relative density (1.68 g·cm−3), more stable molding dimensions (no contraction), and enhanced tensile strength (41.92 MPa). Quasi-static structural failure tests reveal that the standard deviation of compressive strength for SLTP samples in three axes is smaller, registering at 1.10. The dynamic structural damage performance analysis indicates that the failure of energetic composite materials is attributable to separation fracture damage after the appearance of cracks on the tensile surface at −40 and 25 °C. Furthermore, the structural failure of these materials occurs due to significant collapse failure after the compression surface bends inward at 50 °C. Consequently, the present study offers a reliable theoretical foundation and procedural strategy for enhancing the structural strength of triple-base propellants