Publications

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People tracking deals with problems of shape changes, self-occlusions and track occlusions due to other interfering tracks and fixed objects that hide parts of the people shape. These problems are more critical in indoor surveillance and in particular in home automation settings, in which the need to merge information obtained form different cameras distributed around the house calls for the integration of reliable data obtained during time. Therefore, tracking algorithms should be carefully tuned to cope with occlusions and shape changes, working not only at pixel level but also at region level. In this work we provide a novel technique for object tracking, based on probabilistic masks and appearance models. Occlusions due to other tracks or due to background objects and false occlusions are discriminated. The classification of occluded regions of the track is exploited in a selective model update. The tracking system is general enough to be applied with any motion segmentation module, it can track people interacting each other and it maintains the pixel to track assignment even with large occlusions. At the same time, the model update is very reactive, so as to cope with sudden body motion and silhouette's shape changes. Due to its robustness, it has been used in different experiments of people behavior control in indoor situations.

We describe an integrated solution devised for inhouse video surveillance, to control the safety of people living in a domestic environment. The system is composed of robust moving object detection module, able to disregard shadows, a tracking module designed for large occlusion solution and of a posture detector. Shadows, large occlusions and deformable model of people are key features of inhouse surveillance. Moreover, the requirements of high speed reaction to dangerous situations and the need to implement a reliable and low cost televiewing system, led to the introduction of a new multimedia model of semantic transcoding, capable of supporting different user's requests and constraints of their devices (PDA, smart phones, ...). Our application context is the emerging area of domotics (from the Latin word domus that means "home" and informatics) and, in particular, indoor video surveillance of the house where people with some difficulties (elders and disabled people) can now live in a sufficient degree of autonomy, thanks to the strong interaction with the new technologies that can be distributed in the house with affordable costs and high reliability.

The paper presents an approach for a robust (semi-)automatic correction of radial lens distortion in images and videos. This method, based on the Hough transform, has the characteristics to be applicable also on videos from unknown cameras that, consequently, can not be a priori calibrated. We approximated the lens distortion by considering only the lower-order term of the radial distortion. Thus, the method relies on the assumption that pure radial distortion transforms straight lines into curves. The computation of the best value of the distortion parameter is performed in a multi-resolution way. The method precision depends on the scale of the multi-resolution and on the Hough space's resolution. Experiments are provided for both outdoor, uncalibrated camera and an indoor, calibrated one. The stability of the value found in different frames of the same video demonstrates the reliability of the proposed method.

The aim of this study was to provide mathematical descriptors for the border of pigmented skin lesion images and to assess their efficacy for distinction among different lesion groups. New descriptors such as lesion slope and lesion slope regularity are introduced and mathematically defined. A new algorithm based on the Catmull-Rom spline method and the computation of the gray-level gradient of points extracted by interpolation of normal direction on spline points was employed. The efficacy of these new descriptors was tested on a data set of 510 pigmented skin lesions, composed by 85 melanomas and 425 nevi, by employing statistical methods for discrimination between the two populations.

We propose a Web tutoring system in which Artificial Intelligence techniques and Semantic Web approaches are integrated in order to provide an automatic tool able both to completely customize learning on the student’s needs and to exchange learning material with other Web systems. IWT (Intelligent Web Teacher) is based on an ad hoc knowledge representation which describes the didactic domain by means of an Ontology. The student can select the concepts belonging to the Ontology she/he is interested in which. The system planning mechanism builds the most suitable Learning Path for that student.