Rectifier neurons differ from standard ones only in that the sigmoid activation function is replaced by the rectifier function, max(0, x). Several recent studies suggest that rectifier units may be more suitable building units for deep nets. For example, we found that with deep rectifier networks one can attain a similar speech recognition performance than that with sigmoid nets, but without th...

When a firm is regulated under multiple environmental programs, its compliance behavior under these programs can be complementary or substituting—regulations of one program either increase or decrease firm compliance with other programs. This paper examines the existence and the nature of such cross program effects. A panel data model with panel corrected standard error (PCSE) is estimated usin...

This study presents a crop planting and type proportion (CPTP) method for crop acreage estimation of complex and diverse agricultural landscapes. CPTP has three major components: (1) Crop planting proportion (CPP), estimated with wide-swath satellite remote sensing data to completely cover the monitoring area by segmenting cropped and non-cropped areas through unsupervised classification. (2) C...

This paper presents a comparison of modern time and frequency domain coding of ElectroCardioGram (ECG) signals. A set of diierent subband decompositions are compared for coding purposes. These results are then compared with a time domain linear interpolation technique which is optimal with respect to reconstruction error given the number of retained samples. Comparing the optimized time domain ...

Recently, one of the most interesting topics in supply chain management (SCM) is the integrated vendor-buyer production-inventory problem, in which the critical issue is to determine economic lot size per shipment and deliveries. Most researches on this issue assume that products are screened and the process is perfect; however, screening errors (including type-I and type-II) may occur with imp...

Power line inspection ensures the safe operation of a power transmission grid. Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images of power line corridors is an effective way to carry out these vital inspections. In this paper, we propose an automatic inspection method for power lines using UAV images. This method, known as the power line automatic measurement method based on epipolar constraints (PLAME...

We have devised a non-supervised clustering based approach for detecting and recognizing defects in lumber boards. The solution is simple to train, and supports detecting knots and other defects by using multidimensional feature vectors containing texture and color cues from small non-overlapping regions in the image. The key idea is to employ a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for discriminating betw...

Containers and cargos arriving at port-of-entry are inspected using sensors and devices to detect drugs, weapons, nuclear materials and other illegal items. Measurement errors associated with the inspection process may result in higher percentage of misclassification of containers. In this paper, we propose and formulate three inspection policies for containers at port-of-entry assuming the pre...

Experienced engineers utilize Magnetic Flux Leakage (MFL) sensors to scan oil and gas pipelines for the purpose of localizing and sizing different defect types. The huge amount of raw data obtained by these sensors, however, makes the inspection task error-prone and timeconsuming. In this paper, we propose a defect depth estimation approach using artificial neural networks of various architectu...