Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code

Non-maximum suppression is an integral part of the object detection pipeline. First, it sorts all detection boxes on the basis of their scores. The detection box M with the maximum score is selected and all other detection boxes with a significant overlap (using a pre-defined threshold) with M are suppressed. This process is recursively applied on the remaining boxes. As per the design of the algorithm, if an object lies within the predefined overlap threshold, it leads to a miss. To this end, we propose Soft-NMS, an algorithm which decays the detection scores of all other objects as a continuous function of their overlap with M. Hence, no object is eliminated in this process. Soft-NMS obtains consistent improvements for the coco-style mAP metric on standard datasets like PASCAL VOC 2007 (1.7% for both R-FCN and Faster-RCNN) and MS-COCO (1.3% for R-FCN and 1.1% for Faster-RCNN) by just changing the NMS algorithm without any additional hyper-parameters. Using Deformable-RFCN, Soft-NMS improves state-of-the-art in object detection from 39.8% to 40.9% with a single model. Further, the computational complexity of Soft-NMS is the same as traditional NMS and hence it can be efficiently implemented. Since Soft-NMS does not require any extra training and is simple to implement, it can be easily integrated into any object detection pipeline. Code for Soft-NMS is publicly available on GitHub (http://bit.ly/2nJLNMu).Comment: ICCV 2017 camera ready versio

Occurrence of Sun fishes along Tuticorin Coast

During the year 2005, four numbers of Mola mola were encountered along the Tuticorin Coast in Gulf of Mannar, of which three numbers landed at Thiruvaikulam, a fishing hamlet 15 kms north of Tuticorin, and one specimen landed at Kayalpatnam, another fishing village 40 km south of Tuticorin

On the occurrence of sunfish along Gulf of the Mannar

Ocean sunfishes of the family Molidae has three genera namely Ranzania, Masturus and Mola. The occurrence of some of the species like Ranzania truncata, R.typus, R.laevis, Masturus oxyuropterus, M.lanceolatus and Mola mola have been r e p o r t e d from Indian waters

On the largest sun fish ever caught from the Indian seas

A male sun fish Masturus lanceolatus Leonard measuring 1535 mm total length and a maximum depth of 815 mm (Fig. 1) was caught at a depth of 60-90 m in the drift gill net {Paruvakd) operated off Tuticorin on 24-8-1993. This is the second record of this species from Indian coast and first record from Gulf of Mannar and also the largest size of sun fish ever recorded from Indian waters

Strategic implementation of 'everyday low price' in electronic markets: a study of airline pricing on the internet

Working papers seriesAn Everyday Low Price (EDLP) strategy is a product-portfolio level pricing strategy by which a firm attempts to convey to consumers that prices across its product portfolio are consistently low. Empirically, the EDLP strategy is operationalized along two dimensions; the “everyday” component, which relates to the consistency in product prices over time, and the “low price” component, which implies that the prices set are on average lower than other prices available in the market. There may, however, be specific categories or markets in which even EDLP firms may prefer to eschew their consistency and low price goals. The U.S. domestic airline industry has two airlines that adopt the EDLP format while most others employ a promotional (HILO) pricing strategy, thus providing a rich context to investigate how the EDLP price-image strategy is implemented. We use a web crawler to gather information on over 270,000 ticket prices offered by the major airlines in 472 markets, and use a hierarchical linear model to analyze how these two dimensions of price vary with ticket categories and market conditions – defined in economics literature by advance purchase periods, weekend restrictions, airlines’ competitiveness, market distance, and hub operations. We find that the EDLP airlines emphasize the everyday dimension of their pricing much more than the low price dimension. Thus while their prices are systematically more consistent than their HILO competitors, their price levels show that they practice the same form of price discrimination with advance-purchase periods as their HILO competitors. Interestingly, while most airlines charge higher prices for tickets without weekend restriction, which are typically targeted towards business travelers, EDLP firms charge lower prices for these tickets. Further investigation at a category level reveals that these lower business fares are distinct features of short-haul markets where EDLP firms are known to enjoy certain cost advantages due to smaller equipment sizes of their flights. From the “everyday” point of view, we see that while there are no differences in the consistency of prices of EDLP tickets based on advance purchase periods, prices of business-focused EDLP tickets are distinctly more consistent than those of leisure-oriented tickets. Curiously, even in markets where EDLP firms are monopolists, they do not appear to be exercising their monopoly power; on the other hand, HILO firms distinctly employ discriminatory pricing in their monopoly markets. Perhaps this is a reflection of EDLP firms pursuing a limit-pricing/barrier-to-entry strategy. Our research shows that the practice of EDLP in online markets involves strategic variations in how price image is communicated.preprin

Price formats as a source of price dispersion: A Study of online and ofline pices in the dmestic U.S. arline markets

Alarge body of research in economics, information systems, and marketing has sought to understand sources of price dispersion. Previous empirical work has mainly offered consumer- and/or product-based explanations for this phenomenon. In contrast, our research explores the key role played by vendors' price-format adoption in explaining price dispersion. We empirically analyze over a half-million online and offline prices offered by major U.S. airlines in the top 500 domestic markets. Our study shows that a vendor's price format remains an important source of price dispersion in both channels even after accounting for other factors known to impact dispersion in airline ticket prices. Importantly, this finding is true for both transacted and posted tickets. We document several other interesting empirical findings. First, the lower variance in the prices of "everyday low price" (EDLP) firms serves to reduce the market-level dispersion in prices when such firms are present. Moreover, the price variance of non-EDLP firms in these markets is also lower than in those markets in which EDLP competitors are absent. Second, we also find that dispersion in offered prices increases closer to the departure date, which is consistent with theoretical assertion that price dispersion increases with reservation prices. Finally, we continue to observe dispersion of online prices even after accounting for vendor strategy and other known sources of dispersion, suggesting that the prices are unlikely to converge even in the presence of sophisticated online search mechanisms.preprin

A note on the foetus of the hump-back dolphin from Tuticorin coast, Gulf of Mannar

On 16-2-'94 a female Hump - back dolphin Sousachinensis (Osbeck)measuring 2.235 mm and weighing 80 kg was accidently caughtin drift gillnet off Tuticorin. When the dolphin was cut openeda foetus measuring 250 mm was obteilned from i

Whaleshark, Rhincodon typus (Smith) landed at Tuticorin, Gulf of Mannar

On 30-7-2003 a male whale shark Rhyncodon typus measuring 4.78m and weighing approximately 1.7t was caught by a trawler operated at a depth of 70m and 28km away from the shore

Automated Teller Machine (ATM)- a Pathogen City a Surveillance Report From Locations in and Around Madurai City, Tamil Nadu, India

ATM is used by millions of people in a day. It is meant to be a public utility device. Hence the microorganisms plays a major role in accommodating the safer place, ATM. Hence to this account an elaborate survey was taken for complete assessment of microbiology in and around Madurai city. Swabs were collected from each ATM screen, buttons, floor, users hand, exposure of plates and also extended the work in relation with microorganisms prevalent in ladies toilet the samples collected from ATM were plated in nutrient agar plates. The results showed the presence of increased bacterial count subsequently, most pathogens on characterization extended revealed the genus of the particular organism E-coli, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus aures, Klebsiella, Micrococcus, Salmonella, Serratia and fungal species included Aspergillus sp, Mucor sp and Fusarium. Antibiogram study of bacteria also provides us information about the antibiotic resistance pattern of the bacterial isolates