Publications

Barcodes are a critical technology in industrial automation, logistics, and retail, enabling fast and reliable data capture. While deep learning has significantly improved barcode localization accuracy, most modern architectures remain too computationally demanding for real-time deployment on embedded systems without dedicated hardware acceleration. In this work, we present BaFaLo (Barcode Fast Localizer), an ultra-lightweight segmentation-based neural network for barcode localization. Our model is specifically optimized for real-time performance on low-power CPUs while maintaining high localization accuracy for both 1D and 2D barcodes. It features a two-branch architecture—comprising a local feature extractor and a global context module—and is tailored for low-resolution inputs to improve inference speed further. We benchmark BaFaLo against several lightweight architectures for object detection or segmentation, including YOLO Nano, Fast-SCNN, BiSeNet V2, and ContextNet, using the BarBeR dataset. BaFaLo achieves the fastest inference time among all deep-learning models tested, operating at 57.62ms per frame on a single CPU core of a Raspberry Pi 3B+. Despite its compact design, it achieves a decoding rate nearly equivalent to YOLO Nano for 1D barcodes and only 3.5 percentage points lower for 2D barcodes while being approximately nine times faster.

CNNs and Transformer-based architectures are recently dominating the field of 3D medical segmentation. While CNNs face limitations in the local receptive field, Transformers require significant memory and data, making them less suitable for analyzing large 3D medical volumes. Consequently, fully convolutional network models like U-Net are still leading the 3D segmentation scenario. Although efforts have been made to reduce the Transformers computational complexity, such optimized models still struggle with content-based reasoning. This paper examines Mamba, a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based on State Space Models (SSMs), which achieves linear complexity and has outperformed Transformers in long-sequence tasks. Specifically, we assess Mamba’s performance in 3D medical segmentation using three widely recognized and commonly employed datasets and propose architectural enhancements to improve its segmentation effectiveness by mitigating the primary shortcomings of existing Mamba-based solutions.

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of biometric systems, particularly in security-critical applications such as identity verification and access control. Ensuring robustness against such attacks is essential for the safe deployment of face recognition technologies in real-world scenarios. To advance this goal, the 2025 Adversarial Attack Challenge for Secure Face Recognition was organized as part of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) 2025.The competition focused on two main tracks: Detection, where the objective was to determine whether a given face image is clean or adversarial, and Resilience, which aimed to evaluate recognition systems under adversarial perturbations. Participants were provided with a standardized dataset derived from CelebA and LFW, encompassing both clean samples and adversarial images crafted using ten diverse attack methods targeting evasion and impersonation scenarios. To ensure fairness and reproducibility, all models were trained solely on the data provided, with support from a custom open source adversarial attack package tailored for face recognition.In addition to benchmarking adversarial robustness, the challenge contributes to the research community by releasing the data set and the extensible attack package, allowing further investigation of secure and reliable face recognition systems.

The field of Continual Learning (CL) has inspired numerous researchers over the years, leading to increasingly advanced countermeasures to the issue of catastrophic forgetting. Most studies have focused on the single-class scenario, where each example comes with a single label. The recent literature has successfully tackled such a setting, with impressive results. Differently, we shift our attention to the multi-label scenario, as we feel it to be more representative of real-world open problems. In our work, we show that existing state-of-the-art CL methods fail to achieve satisfactory performance, thus questioning the real advance claimed in recent years. Therefore, we assess both old-style and novel strategies and propose, on top of them, an approach called Selective Class Attention Distillation (SCAD). It relies on a knowledge transfer technique that seeks to align the representations of the student network – which trains continuously and is subject to forgetting – with the teacher ones, which is pretrained and kept frozen. Importantly, our method is able to selectively transfer the relevant information from the teacher to the student, thereby preventing irrelevant information from harming the student’s performance during online training. To demonstrate the merits of our approach, we conduct experiments on two different multi-label datasets, showing that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art Continual Learning methods. Our findings highlight the importance of addressing the unique challenges posed by multi-label environments in the field of Continual Learning. The code of SCAD is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/SCAD-LOD-2024.

Negli ultimi anni, la complessità dei sistemi produttivi è aumentata significativamente a causa dei progressi nelle tecnologie derivanti dall'Industria 4.0, in particolare attraverso l'Internet of Things (IoT) e i big data. Questa evoluzione ha facilitato l'accesso senza precedenti a enormi quantità di dati, ma ha anche introdotto sfide nella raccolta dei dati e nella loro applicazione pratica per gli operatori che interagiscono con questi sistemi. Questa tesi presenta un'architettura IoT progettata per ambienti industriali reali, con l'obiettivo di dimostrare come i dati possano essere utilizzati efficacemente per monitorare le operazioni e i processi produttivi in tempo reale. L'approccio proposto migliora la capacità di rilevare e gestire i guasti, fornendo agli operatori le informazioni necessarie per prendere decisioni informate. Integrando sensori intelligenti e analisi avanzate, è possibile ottenere una visibilità dettagliata sullo stato del sistema, consentendo interventi di manutenzione tempestivi e preparando il terreno per future implementazioni di manutenzione predittiva. La ricerca include un'analisi di due casi di studio distinti, mostrando la versatilità dell'architettura in diverse applicazioni industriali. Illustra come l'utilizzo efficace dei dati possa ottimizzare l'efficienza operativa e ridurre i tempi di inattività, contribuendo così a una migliore gestione del sistema. Inoltre, questo approccio consente agli operatori umani di comprendere meglio i loro ambienti e di prendere decisioni autonome basate su informazioni in tempo reale.