Publications

The last years have seen an explosion of work on the integration of vision and language data. New tasks like Image Captioning and Visual Questions Answering have been proposed and impressive results have been achieved. There is now a shared desire to gain an in-depth understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of those models. To this end, several datasets have been proposed to try and challenge the state-of-the-art. Those datasets, however, mostly focus on the interpretation of objects (as denoted by nouns in the corresponding captions). In this paper, we reuse a previously proposed methodology to evaluate the ability of current systems to move beyond objects and deal with attributes (as denoted by adjectives), actions (verbs), manner (adverbs) and spatial relations (prepositions). We show that the coarse representations given by current approaches are not informative enough to interpret attributes or actions, whilst spatial relations somewhat fare better, but only in attention models.

Fast and accurate upper-body and head pose estimation is a key task for automatic monitoring of driver attention, a challenging context characterized by severe illumination changes, occlusions and extreme poses. In this work, we present a new deep learning framework for head localization and pose estimation on depth images. The core of the proposal is a regression neural network, called POSEidon, which is composed of three independent convolutional nets followed by a fusion layer, specially conceived for understanding the pose by depth. In addition, to recover the intrinsic value of face appearance for understanding head position and orientation, we propose a new Face-from-Depth approach for learning image faces from depth. Results in face reconstruction are qualitatively impressive. We test the proposed framework on two public datasets, namely Biwi Kinect Head Pose and ICT-3DHP, and on Pandora, a new challenging dataset mainly inspired by the automotive setup. Results show that our method overcomes all recent state-of-art works, running in real time at more than 30 frames per second.

Automatic layout analysis has proven to be extremely important in the process of digitization of large amounts of documents. In this paper we present a mixed approach to layout analysis, introducing a SVM-aided layout segmentation process and a classification process based on local and geometrical features. The final output of the automatic analysis algorithm is a complete and structured annotation in JSON format, containing the digitalized text as well as all the references to the illustrations of the input page, and which can be used by visualization interfaces as well as annotation interfaces. We evaluate our algorithm on a large dataset built upon the first volume of the “Enciclopedia Treccani”.

Despite the advent of autonomous cars, it's likely - at least in the near future - that human attention will still maintain a central role as a guarantee in terms of legal responsibility during the driving task. In this paper we study the dynamics of the driver's gaze and use it as a proxy to understand related attentional mechanisms. First, we build our analysis upon two questions: where and what the driver is looking at? Second, we model the driver's gaze by training a coarse-to-fine convolutional network on short sequences extracted from the DR(eye)VE dataset. Experimental comparison against different baselines reveal that the driver's gaze can indeed be learnt to some extent, despite i) being highly subjective and ii) having only one driver's gaze available for each sequence due to the irreproducibility of the scene. Eventually, we advocate for a new assisted driving paradigm which suggests to the driver, with no intervention, where she should focus her attention.

In this paper we propose a deep architecture for detecting people attributes (e.g. gender, race, clothing ...) in surveillance contexts. Our proposal explicitly deal with poor resolution and occlusion issues that often occur in surveillance footages by enhancing the images by means of Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGAN). Experiments show that by combining both our Generative Reconstruction and Deep Attribute Classification Network we can effectively extract attributes even when resolution is poor and in presence of strong occlusions up to 80% of the whole person figure.

We examined predictors and consequences of intergroup nonverbal behaviour by relying on new technologies and new objective indices. In three studies, both in the laboratory and in the field with children, behaviour was a function of implicit prejudice.

Melanoma is one of the deadliest form of skin cancers so it becomes crucial the developing of automated systems that analyze and investigate epidermal images to early identify them also reducing unnecessary medical exams. A key element is the availability of user-friendly annotation tools that can be used by non-IT experts to produce well-annotated and high-quality medical data. In this work, we present an annotation tool to manually crate and annotate digital epidermal images, with the aim to extract meta-data (annotations, contour patterns and intersections, color information) stored and organized in an integrated digital library. This tool is obtained following rigid usability principles also based on doctors interviews and opinions. A preliminary but functional evaluation phase has been conducted with non-medical subjects by using questionnaires, in order to check the general usability and the efficacy of the proposed tool.

Background: Massive parallel sequencing of transcriptomes revealed the presence of miRNA variants named isomiRs. The sequence variations identified within isomiR molecules can affect their targeting activity, with consequences in gene expression and potential impact in multi-factorial diseases. miRNAs are considered good biomarkers, making their adoption for disease characterization highly desirable. Several methodologies and tools were devised to identify and quantify miRNAs from sequencing data. However, all these tools are built on-top of general-purpose alignment algorithms, providing poorly accurate results and no information concerning isomiRs and conserved miRNA-mRNA interaction sites. Method: To overcome these limitations we developed the isomiR-SEA algorithm. By implementing a miRNA-specific alignment procedure, isomiR-SEA analysis accounts for accurate miRNA/isomiR expression levels and for a precise evaluation of the conserved interaction sites. As first, isomiR-SEA identifies miRNA seeds within the tags. If the seed is found, the alignment is extended and the positions of the encountered mismatches recorded. Then, the collected info is evaluated to distinguish among miRNAs and isomiRs and to assess the conservation of the interaction sites. Results & Conclusion: isomiR-SEA performance was assessed on 7 public RNA-Seq datasets. 40% of reads attributed to miRNAs (189M) comes from mature miRNAs, 50% derives instead from 3’ isomiRs, and the remaining reads account for 5’/SNP isomiRs or combinations between them. Furthermore, about 2% of reads lost some interaction sites. This proves the importance of a miRNA-specific alignment algorithm to correctly evaluate miRNA targeting activity. Expression levels of isomiRs detected in the two experiments were aggregated and classified with two deepness. In experiment 1, isoforms with indel (in one or both ends) are grouped together. Whereas, in experiment 2 we make a distinction between reads aligned on the mature miRNA with insertion (+) or deletion (-) on 5' or 3' ends. This shows the capability of isomiR-SEA to generate enriched results that can be analysed in down-stream analysis customized for the investigation purpose.

In recent years the interest of biomedical and computer vision communities in acquisition and analysis of epidermal images increased because melanoma is one of the deadliest form of skin cancer and its early identification could save lives reducing unnecessary medical treatments. User-friendly automatic tools can be very useful for physicians and dermatologists in fact high-resolution images and their annotated data, combined with analysis pipelines and machine learning techniques, represent the base to develop intelligent and proactive diagnostic systems. In this work we present two skin lesion detection pipelines on dermoscopic medical images, by exploiting standard techniques combined with workarounds that improve results; moreover to highlight the performance we consider a set of metrics combined with pixel labeling and classification. A preliminary but functional evaluation phase has been conducted with a sub-set of hard-to-treat images, in order to check which proposed detection pipeline reaches the best results.