- Pisa, Italy
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Within the European research project Argomarine (FP7-SST-2008-RTD-1-234096 "Argomarine-Automatic Oil–spill and geopositioning integrated in a marine information system") [1], coordinated by the Park Authority of the Tuscan... more
Within the European research project Argomarine (FP7-SST-2008-RTD-1-234096 "Argomarine-Automatic Oil–spill and geopositioning integrated in a marine information system") [1], coordinated by the Park Authority of the Tuscan Archipelago, the Signals and Images Laboratory (SI-LAB) of the Institute of Information Science and Technology of the National Research Council of Pisa has developed a Marine Information System (MIS) to detect, monitor and manage marine pollution events, ranging from major accidents to micro oil spillages. <br> The MIS was conceived as a connected group of subsystems for performing data storage, decision-support, data mining and analysis over data warehouses, as well as a web-GIS portal for easy access and usage of products and services released to end-users. <br> The main task of the MIS is to serve as a shell to integrating data, information and knowledge from various sources pertained to the marine areas of interest, by means of adequate I...
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Cerebral blood flow (CBF) is significantly influenced by exposure to hypoxia, both hypobaric and normobaric. Alterations in cerebral blood flow can play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of acute mountain sickness (AMS) and its symptoms,... more
Cerebral blood flow (CBF) is significantly influenced by exposure to hypoxia, both hypobaric and normobaric. Alterations in cerebral blood flow can play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of acute mountain sickness (AMS) and its symptoms, especially headache, dizziness, and nausea. Acupuncture has been proven to be effective in treating some cerebrovascular disorders and PC6 Nei Guan stimulation seems to enhance cerebral blood flow. Therefore, we have hypothesized that PC6 Nei Guan stimulation could affect CBF in acute hypoxia and could be used to contrast AMS symptoms. We evaluated blood flow in the middle cerebral artery (MCA) in normoxia, after 15 min in normobaric hypoxia (fraction of inspired oxygen (FiO2) 14%, corresponding to 3600 m a.s.l.) in basal conditions, and after PC6 Nei Guan stimulation, both by needle and by pressure. No comparisons with other acupuncture points and sham acupuncture were done. PC6 stimulation seemed to counteract the effects of acute normobaric hypo...
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This report summarizes a part of the activities carried out within the EU FP7-IP-Project CHRONIOUS, <em>An Open, Ubiquitous and Adaptive Chronic Disease Management Platform for COPD and Renal Insufficiency</em><em> (GA... more
This report summarizes a part of the activities carried out within the EU FP7-IP-Project CHRONIOUS, <em>An Open, Ubiquitous and Adaptive Chronic Disease Management Platform for COPD and Renal Insufficiency</em><em> (GA </em>216461), more precisely within Work Package 6. One of the key components of the platform is the CHRONIOUS Guidelines Framework. It is aimed at offering all the Decision Support services for professionals involved in the Chronic Disease Monitoring and Management Process. This module contains all the decision support functionalities needed for providing the possible diagnoses and treatments according to the medical category of the patient and the patient's specific data available. This report addresses the work done on modelling the guidelines for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
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The detection of power transmission lines is highly important for threat avoidance, especially when aerial vehicle fly at low altitude. At the same time, the demand for fast and robust algorithms for the analysis of data acquired by... more
The detection of power transmission lines is highly important for threat avoidance, especially when aerial vehicle fly at low altitude. At the same time, the demand for fast and robust algorithms for the analysis of data acquired by drones during inspections has also increased. In this paper, different methods to obtain these objectives are presented, which include three parts: sensor fusion, power line extraction and fault detection. At first, fusion algorithm for visible and infrared power line images is presented. Manual control points describe as feature points from both images were selected and then, applied geometric transformation model to register visible and infrared thermal images. For the extraction of power lines, we applied Canny edge detection to identify significant transition followed by Hough transform to highlight power lines. The method significantly identify edges from the set of frames with good accuracy. After the detection of lines, we applied histogram based thresholding to identify hot spots in power lines. The paper concludes with the description of the current work, which has been carried out in a research project, namely SCIADRO.
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Research Interests: Engineering, Computer Science, Visualization, Stress, Affective Computing, and 4 moreWell Being, IEEE, I, and B
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This paper presents an approach for the integration of multimedia metadata and their management based on Semantic Web technology. In particular, we propose a java-based Infrastructure for MultiMedia Metadata Management – 4M composed of... more
This paper presents an approach for the integration of multimedia metadata and their management based on Semantic Web technology. In particular, we propose a java-based Infrastructure for MultiMedia Metadata Management – 4M composed of five main components, an MPEG-7 feature processing unit, an XML database management unit, an algorithms ontologyexploiting unit, a multimedia semantic annotation and integration units. This way, we intend to introduce the novel idea of managing also algorithms on a variety of multimedia metadata (audio, images and videos) to add the capability of tracking data processing. This work is mainly carried out in the framework of the European Network of Excellence MUSCLE (Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning), where ISTI-CNR is leading the ‘Representation and Communication of Data and Metadata’ Workpackage.
This presentation was delivered in the framework of Artes 4.0 seminars. It deals with the application of computer vision, intelligent systems and AR/VR/MR/XR technologies to Industry 4.0.
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THESAURUS: UN DATABASE PER IL PATRIMONIO CULTURALE SOMMERSO 1. Thesaurus: obiettivi e partenariato Nel 2011 è stato approvato dalla Regione Toscana un progetto inter-disciplinare per la promozione della conoscenza del patrimonio culturale... more
THESAURUS: UN DATABASE PER IL PATRIMONIO CULTURALE SOMMERSO 1. Thesaurus: obiettivi e partenariato Nel 2011 è stato approvato dalla Regione Toscana un progetto inter-disciplinare per la promozione della conoscenza del patrimonio culturale sommerso. Il titolo del progetto TecnicHe per l'Esplorazione Sottomarina Archeologica mediante l'Utilizzo di Robot aUtonomi in Sciami (Thesaurus) intende sottolineare l'interesse all'integrazione di diverse discipline per l'o-biettivo unico della conoscenza e tutela del patrimonio sommerso (http:// thesaurus.isti.cnr.it/). Il partenariato di Thesaurus è composto da quattro unità, che si occupano di aspetti diversi ma complementari. Il Centro Piag-gio dell'Università di Pisa 1 e il Dipartimento Sergio Stecco dell'Università di Firenze 2 lavorano alla progettazione di uno sciame di veicoli sottomarini che siano capaci di esplorare i fondali alla ricerca di oggetti di interesse storico e/o archeologico. Il tratto innovativo...
MUSCLE (Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning) is a European Network of Excellence (NoE) that aims fostering close collaboration between research groups in multimedia data mining and machine learning. Within... more
MUSCLE (Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning) is a European Network of Excellence (NoE) that aims fostering close collaboration between research groups in multimedia data mining and machine learning. Within MUSCLE, our research is focused on investigating standards and tools that allow interoper-ability of heterogeneous and distributed (meta)data also by enabling data descriptions of high semantic content (eg ontologies, MPEG-7 and XML schemata) and inference schemes that can reason about these at the appropriate levels. Metadata are used to represent the value-added information that describes the technical and semantic characteristics associated with MM data. Metadata make data more processable, allowing more efficient retrieval or classification, quality estimation and prediction based on Machine Learning techniques in both single and multiple-modality. Many initiatives for metadata standard-isation have been proposed in order to describe multimedia...
The power transmission lines are the link between power plants and the points of consumption, through substations. Most importantly, the assessment of damaged aerial power lines and rusted conductors is of extreme importance for public... more
The power transmission lines are the link between power plants and the points of consumption, through substations. Most importantly, the assessment of damaged aerial power lines and rusted conductors is of extreme importance for public safety; hence, power lines and associated components must be periodically inspected to ensure a continuous supply and to identify any fault and defect. To achieve these objectives, recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used; in fact, they provide a safe way to bring sensors close to the power transmission lines and their associated components without halting the equipment during the inspection, and reducing operational cost and risk. In this work, a drone, equipped with multi-modal sensors, captures images in the visible and infrared domain and transmits them to the ground station. We used state-of-the-art computer vision methods to highlight expected faults (i.e., hot spots) or damaged components of the electrical infrastructure ...
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A machine learning method for classifying Lung UltraSound is here proposed to pro- vide a point of care tool for supporting a safe, fast and accurate diagnosis, that can also be useful during a pandemic like as SARS-CoV-2. Given the... more
A machine learning method for classifying Lung UltraSound is here proposed to pro- vide a point of care tool for supporting a safe, fast and accurate diagnosis, that can also be useful during a pandemic like as SARS-CoV-2. Given the advantages (e.g. safety, rapidity, portability, cost-effectiveness) provided by the ultrasound technology over other methods (e.g. X-ray, computer tomography, magnetic resonance imaging), our method was validated on the largest LUS public dataset. Focusing on both accuracy and efficiency, our solution is based on an efficient adaptive ensembling of two EfficientNet-b0 models reaching 100% of accuracy, which, to our knowledge, outperforms the previous state-of-the-art. The complexity of this solution keeps the number of parameters in the same order as an EfficientNet-b0 by adopting specific design choices that are adaptive ensembling with a combination layer, ensembling performed on the deep features, minimal ensemble only two weak models. Moreover, a vis...
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A novel method for improving plant disease classification, a challenging and time-consuming process, is proposed. First, using as baseline EfficientNet, a recent and advanced family of architectures having an excellent accuracy/complexity... more
A novel method for improving plant disease classification, a challenging and time-consuming process, is proposed. First, using as baseline EfficientNet, a recent and advanced family of architectures having an excellent accuracy/complexity trade-off, we have introduced, devised, and applied refined techniques based on transfer learning, regularization, stratification, weighted metrics, and advanced optimizers in order to achieve improved performance. Then, we go further by introducing adaptive minimal ensembling, which is a unique input to the knowledge base of the proposed solution. This represents a leap forward since it allows improving the accuracy with limited complexity using only two EfficientNet-b0 weak models, performing ensembling on feature vectors by a trainable layer instead of classic aggregation on outputs. To the best of our knowledge, such an approach to ensembling has never been used before in literature. Our method was tested on PlantVillage, a public reference dat...
The Signal & Images Laboratory (SI-Lab) is an interdisciplinary research group in computer vision, signal analysis, smart vision systems and multimedia data understanding. It is part of the Institute for Information Science and... more
The Signal & Images Laboratory (SI-Lab) is an interdisciplinary research group in computer vision, signal analysis, smart vision systems and multimedia data understanding. It is part of the Institute for Information Science and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy. This report accounts for the research activities of the Signal and Images Laboratory of the Institute of Information Science and Technologies during the year 2020
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This report aims at providing a technical introduction to the eXtensible Markup<br> Language, known as XML. This language has been developed by W3C, the<br> World Wide Web Consortium in order to offer an effective mechanism... more
This report aims at providing a technical introduction to the eXtensible Markup<br> Language, known as XML. This language has been developed by W3C, the<br> World Wide Web Consortium in order to offer an effective mechanism for<br> managing structured data on the Web, thus overcoming the limits of HTML<br> (Hyper Text Markup Language). We examine the components of the language<br> and the way in which it differs with HTML. Examples are given of current<br> possible uses and suggestion are made for future applications. We also briefly<br> outline some of the new standards that are emerged, or now emering with<br> respect to XML.
— The management and exchange of multimedia data is a challenging area of research due to the variety of formats, standards and the many interesting intended applications. Semantic web technologies are very promising to enable... more
— The management and exchange of multimedia data is a challenging area of research due to the variety of formats, standards and the many interesting intended applications. Semantic web technologies are very promising to enable interoperability and integration of media. Many research groups are active in finding and proposing interesting solutions or standards. Within the MUSCLE NoE research is focusing on standards, technologies and techniques for integrating, exchanging and enhancing the use of multimedia within a variety of research areas. At CNR ISTI, we are developing an infrastructure for MultiMedia Metadata Management (4M) to support the integration of media from different sources. This infrastructure enables the collection, analysis and integration of media for semantic annotation, search and retrieval. In this paper we discuss the independent units that are used within the infrastructure and the semantic web technologies that are being used to support them.
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The main purpose of this paper is to describe a software platform dedicated to sea surveillance, capable of detecting and identifying illegal maritime traffic. This platform results from the cascade pipeline of several image processing... more
The main purpose of this paper is to describe a software platform dedicated to sea surveillance, capable of detecting and identifying illegal maritime traffic. This platform results from the cascade pipeline of several image processing algorithms that input Radar or Optical imagery captured by satellite-borne sensors and try to identify vessel targets in the scene and provide quantitative descriptors about their shape and motion. This platform is innovative since it integrates in its architecture heterogeneous data and data processing solutions with the goal of identifying navigating vessels in a unique and completely automatic processing streamline. More in detail, the processing chain consists of: (i) the detection of target vessels in an input map; (ii) the estimation of each vessel’s most descriptive geometrical and scatterometric (for radar images) features; (iii) the estimation of the kinematics of each vessel; (iv) the prediction of each vessel’s forthcoming route; and (v) th...
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Chronic heart failure is a severe clinical syndrome among the most remarkable for prevalence and morbidity in the developed western countries. The European STREP project HEARTFAID aims at realizing an innovative platform of services which... more
Chronic heart failure is a severe clinical syndrome among the most remarkable for prevalence and morbidity in the developed western countries. The European STREP project HEARTFAID aims at realizing an innovative platform of services which will improve the processes of diagnosis, prognosis and therapy provision in the heart failure domain. The core of the platform intelligence is a Clinical Decision
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The management and exchange of multimedia data is a challenging area of research due to the variety of formats, standards and the many interesting intended applications. Semantic web technologies are very promising to enable... more
The management and exchange of multimedia data is a challenging area of research due to the variety of formats, standards and the many interesting intended applications. Semantic web technologies are very promising to enable interoperability and integration of media. Many research groups are active in finding and proposing interesting solutions or standards. Within the MUSCLE NoE research is focusing on standards, technologies and techniques for integrating, exchanging and enhancing the use of multimedia within a variety of research areas. At CNR ISTI, we are developing an infrastructure for MultiMedia Metadata Management (4M) to support the integration of media from different sources. This infrastructure enables the collection, analysis and integration of media for semantic annotation, search and retrieval. In this paper we discuss the independent units that are used within the infrastructure and the semantic web technologies that are being used to support them. the representation ...
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The early diagnosis of a cancer type is a fundamental goal in cancer treatment, as it can facilitate the subsequent clinical management of patients. The leading importance of classifying cancer patients into high or low risk groups has... more
The early diagnosis of a cancer type is a fundamental goal in cancer treatment, as it can facilitate the subsequent clinical management of patients. The leading importance of classifying cancer patients into high or low risk groups has led many research teams, both from biomedical and bioinformatics field, to study the application of Deep Learning (DL) methods. The ability of DL tools to detect key features from complex datasets is a fundamental achievement in early diagnosis and cell cancer progression. In this paper, we apply DL approach to classification of osteosarcoma cells. Osteosarcoma is the most common bone cancer occurring prevalently in children or young adults. Glass slides of different cell populations were cultured from Mesenchimal Stromal Cells (MSCs) and differentiated in healthy bone cells (osteoblasts) or osteosarcoma cells. Images of such samples are recorded with an optical microscope. DL is then applied to identify and classify single cells. The results show a c...
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The ability to detect and monitor oil spills at sea is becoming increasingly important due to the high demand of oil-based products. Remote sensing frameworks have been proven to give accurate results in case of major events; nonetheless,... more
The ability to detect and monitor oil spills at sea is becoming increasingly important due to the high demand of oil-based products. Remote sensing frameworks have been proven to give accurate results in case of major events; nonetheless, also medium and micro oil spills have their own importance, especially in protected areas that deserve special attention. In this paper, we propose a monitoring framework based on the collection of in situ observations and on their integration with remote sensing in order to fill out existing observational gaps. In particular, besides the data collected by special monitoring devices, in situ observations include volunteered geographical information as an additional source of valuable data. Oil spill sights, notified by volunteers through a specially-designed app, are integrated in the monitoring system and therein processed together with remote sensing data in order to proactively detect anomalous events and produce alerts. Field operational tests ...
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Introduction An innovative teleconsultation platform has been designed, developed and validated between summer 2017 and winter 2018, in five mountain huts and in three remote outpatient clinical centres of the Italian region Valle d’Aosta... more
Introduction An innovative teleconsultation platform has been designed, developed and validated between summer 2017 and winter 2018, in five mountain huts and in three remote outpatient clinical centres of the Italian region Valle d’Aosta of the Mont Blanc massif area. Methods An ad-hoc videoconference system was developed within the framework of the e-Rés@MONT (Interreg ALCOTRA) European project, to tackle general health problems and high-altitude diseases (such as acute mountain sickness, high-altitude pulmonary and cerebral oedema). The system allows for contacting physicians at the main hospital in Aosta to perform a specific diagnosis and to give specific advice and therapy to the patients in an extreme environment out-hospital setting. At an altitude between 1500–3500 m, five trained nurses performed clinical evaluations (anamnesis, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation), electrocardiographic and echography monitoring on both tourists and residents as necessary; all of...