There are two kinds of universal schemes for estimating residual waiting times, those where the error tends to zero almost surely and those where the error tends to zero in some integral norm. Usually these schemes are different because different methods are used to prove their consistency. In this note we will give a single scheme where the average error is eventually small for all time instants, while the error itself tends to zero along a sequence of stopping times of density one.
We address here the problem of scale and rotation invariant object recognition, making use of a correspondence-based mechanism, in which the identity of an object represented by sensory signals is determined by matching it to a representation stored in memory. The sensory representation is in general affected by various transformations, notably scale and rotation, thus giving rise to the fundamental problem of invariant object recognition. We focus here on a neurally plausible mechanism that deals simultaneously with identification of the object and detection of the transformation, both types of information being important for visual processing. Our mechanism is based on macrocolumnar units. These evaluate identity- and transformation-specific feature similarities, performing competitive selection of the alternatives of their own subtask, and cooperate to make a coherent global decision for the identity, scale and rotation of the object.