Pooling is a ubiquitous operation in image processing algorithms that allows for higher-level processes to collect relevant low-level features from a region of interest. Currently, max-pooling is one of the most commonly used operators in the computational literature. However, it can lack robustness to outliers due to the fact that it relies merely on the peak of a function. Pooling mechanisms ...

In object recognition, the Bag-of-Words model assumes: i) extraction of local descriptors from images, ii) embedding these descriptors by a coder to a given visual vocabulary space which results in so-called mid-level features, iii) extracting statistics from mid-level features with a pooling operator that aggregates occurrences of visual words in images into so-called signatures. As the last s...

Background: Milk is one of the most nutritious foods providing a variety of proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins needed to maintain, grow, and develop the body. The aim of this study was to assess microbial and chemical adulterants of raw cow milk collected from dairy farms of Hlabisa villages, KwaZulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Methods: A total of 68 raw cow milk samples were obtained fr...

The practice of inventory pooling–serving two or more separate markets using a common inventory stock–is extensively studied in operations management. The operational benefits of this strategy are well known: when demand is stochastic, combining multiple markets reduces aggregate uncertainty and improves the firm’s ability to efficiently match supply and demand, increasing profit as a result. I...

A number of techniques for generating mid-level features, including two variants of Soft Assignment, Locality-constrained Linear Coding, and Sparse Coding, are evaluated in the main document [1]. Pooling methods that aggregate mid-level features into vectors representing images like Average pooling, Max-pooling, and a family of likelihood inspired pooling strategies are scrutinised there. This ...

The rising car usage deriving from growth in jobs and residential population results in air pollution, energy waste and unproductive and unpleasant consumption of people’s time. Public transport cannot be the only answer to this increasing transport demand. Car pooling has emerged to be a viable possibility for reducing private car usage in congested areas. Its actual practice requires a suitab...

Detecting complex events in a large video collection crawled from video websites is a challenging task. When applying directly good image-based feature representation, e.g., HOG, SIFT, to videos, we have to face the problem of how to pool multiple frame feature representations into one feature representation. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based frame pooling method. We formulate th...

The screening of data sets for "positive data objects" is essential to modern technology. A (group) test that indicates whether a positive data object is in a specific subset or pool of the dataset can greatly facilitate the identification of all the positive data objects. A collection of tested pools is called a pooling design. Pooling designs are standard experimental tools in many biotechnic...

W study inventory pooling in systems with symmetric costs where supply lead times are endogenously generated by a finite-capacity production system. We investigate the sensitivity of the cost advantage of inventory pooling to various system parameters, including loading, service levels, demand and production time variability, and structure of the production system. The analysis reveals differen...