It is widely believed that the statistical properties of the natural visual environment play a fundamental role in the evolution, development and adaptation of the human visual system (HVS). An important observation about natural image signals is that they are highly structured. By “structured signal”, we mean that the signal samples exhibit strong dependencies amongst themselves, especially wh...

This paper presents empirical evidence that endogenous fixed costs play a central role in determining the equilibrium structure of the retail food industry. Using the framework developed in Sutton [Sutton, J. (1991). Sunk Cost and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration (MIT Press, Cambridge).], I construct a structural model of retail competition in...

Objective image/video quality measures play important roles in various image/video processing applications, such as compression, communication, printing, analysis, registration, restoration and enhancement. Most proposed quality assessment approaches in the literature are error sensitivity-based methods. In this paper, we follow a new philosophy in designing image/video quality metrics, which u...

abstract successful presence of indian and pakistani rice in iran’s market due to having similar quality with the domestic rice, extensive advertisement, and good packaging has faced rice production in iran with a big challenge. assuming that the attractions of iranian consumers toward these imported rice varieties are a signal of changes in the preferences of the domestic consumers in favor of...

The image quality assessment has been widely used in image processing. Several researches have been developed and carried considering the Human Visual System (HVS). Under the hypothesis that human visual perception is extremely adapted to retrieve structural information from a scene, the SSIM index is the most widely used in this area, which leads to a better correlation with HVS. Despite its r...

Despite extensive research on service quality and its consequences, there is still a lack of empirical research examining these variables in the context of resort hotels. In fi lling the gap, this study aims to assess service quality as determinant of customer satisfaction and resulting behavioural intentions in the context of Malaysian resort hotels. Based on the literature review, this study ...

This study was conducted to develop a construct model regarding the daily activities, emotional security provided by food, enjoyment of food, level of satisfaction with delivered food, and the quality of life of homebound seniors who benefitted from meal delivery programs. The data were analyzed by SAS 9.2 and the Structural Equation Model (SEM), which was created by Analysis of Moment Structur...

Poor Information Quality (IQ) has a significant impact on the general performance of an organization. Investments in IT have had a great impact on the banking industry in recent years, producing a large increase in the volume of information; these investments, however, have not ensured a corresponding return in terms of the quality of information produced. The aim of the present study is to val...

The PharmaCloud allows physicians to streamline many of their healthcare processes and ensure patient safety in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Despite its great potential, however, there are gaps in our understanding of how physicians evaluate change in relation to the PharmaCloud and why they decide to resist it. Thus, this study develops an integrated model to explain physicians’...

Human factors research in conceptual modeling is scarce. Recently, quality assurance frameworks, methods and tools for conceptual schemas have received increased research attention, but the perception of quality by schema users has largely been ignored in this stream of research. This paper proposes a tentative model of user beliefs and attitudes towards the quality of conceptual schemas. The p...