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The 6D pose estimation is a crucial branch of robot vision. However, the authors find that due to the failure to make full use of the complementarity of the appearance and geometry information of the object, the failure to deeply explore the contributions of the features from different regions to the pose estimation, and the failure to take advantage of the invariance of the geometric structure of keypoints, the performances of the most existing methods are not satisfactory. This paper aims to design a high-precision 6D pose estimation method based on above insights.

First, a multi-scale cross-attention-based feature fusion module (MCFF) is designed to aggregate the appearance and geometry information by exploring the correlations between appearance features and geometry features in the various regions. Second, the authors build a multi-query regional-attention-based feature differentiation module (MRFD) to learn the contribution of each region to each keypoint. Finally, a geometric enhancement mechanism (GEM) is designed to use structure information to predict keypoints and optimize both pose and keypoints in the inference phase.

Experiments on several benchmarks and real robot show that the proposed method performs better than existing methods. Ablation studies illustrate the effectiveness of each module of the authors’ method.

A high-precision 6D pose estimation method is proposed by studying the relationship between the appearance and geometry from different object parts and the geometric invariance of the keypoints, which is of great significance for various robot applications.

This study examines the convergence of energy diversification, financial development and per-capita income in OECD countries.

The research employs the club convergence test to assess convergence among OECD countries and uses Granger causality tests and panel regressions to identify the determinants of convergence, using data from 1997 to 2021.

The convergence tests showed no overall convergence but revealed convergence clubs for each factor. Granger causality tests indicated short-run bi-directional relationships between the variables. Long-run panel regression analysis confirmed that technological progress significantly improves per capita income and energy diversification. Additionally, it revealed bi-directional relationships between energy diversification and financial development, a uni-directional relationship from financial development to per capita income and a U-shaped effect of per capita income on energy diversification, with a turning point at $67,112.8 per year.

The findings suggest that within each convergence club, implementing microeconomic incentives for technology development and diffusion in energy, production and financial services could help lagging countries catch up.

This study pioneers the testing of convergence in energy diversification, financial development and per capita income in OECD countries and identifies the determinants of this convergence.

While extensive research exists on how positive life circumstances and positive personality traits promote entrepreneurship, there is little research focusing on how negative personal circumstances may potentially breed entrepreneurship. This study aims to build upon the theory of underdog entrepreneurship to examine the effect of challenging life circumstances such as poverty on the development of entrepreneurial traits in underdog entrepreneurs. This research analyzed the effect of risk-taking (RT) on the entrepreneurial success (ES) of underdog entrepreneurs and the role of optimism (OPM) and persistence (P) as mediating variables and poverty as a moderator variable.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted to collect data from 400 micro-finance borrowers of Akhuwat Foundation Pakistan. Akhuwat provides interest-free small loans to the poor segment of society. Preliminary testing of the survey questionnaire with a sample of 35 borrowers of Akhuwat Foundation in Lahore city was conducted before data collection. Data was collected from four randomly selected branches in Lahore city.

The authors found that OPM and P significantly mediate the relationship between RT and ES. In addition, the authors analyzed the moderating effect of poverty on the relationship between OPM and ES and found a negative moderating effect. A strong positive moderating effect of poverty was found on the relationship between P and ES. The results of multi-group analysis show that successful and unsuccessful underdog entrepreneurs differ in their RT propensity, which is significantly mediated by OPM and P.

This study provides empirical evidence on entrepreneurial traits and success of poor entrepreneur in an emerging economy. This work is original and has not been submitted elsewhere.