Publications

Multimedia forensics is a new emerging discipline regarding the analysis and exploitation of digital data as support for investigation to extract probative elements. Among them, visual data about people and people activities, extracted from videos in an efficient way, are becoming day by day more appealing for forensics, due to the availability of large video-surveillance footage. Thus, many research studies and prototypes investigate the analysis of soft biometrics data, such as people appearance and people trajectories. In this work, we propose new solutions for querying and retrieving visual data in an interactive and active fashion for soft biometrics in forensics. The innovative proposal joins the capability of transductive learning for semi-supervised search by similarity and a typical multimedia methodology based on user-guided relevance feedback to allow an active interaction with the visual data of people, appearance and trajectory in large surveillance areas. Approaches proposed are very general and can be exploited independently by the surveillance setting and the type of video analytic tools.

The automatization of the analysis of Indirect Immunofluorescence (IIF) images is of paramount importance for the diagnosis of autoimmune diseases. This paper proposes a solution to one of the most challenging steps of this process, the segmentation of HEp-2 cells, through an adaptive marker-controlled watershed approach. Our algorithm automatically conforms the marker selection pipeline to the peculiar characteristics of the input image, hence it is able to cope with different fluorescent intensities and staining patterns without any a priori knowledge. Furthermore, it shows a reduced sensitivity to over-segmentation errors and uneven illumination, that are typical issues of IIF imaging.

Sensing floors are becoming an emerging solution for many privacy-compliant and large area surveillance systems. Many research and even commercial Technologies have been proposed in the last years. Similarly to distributed camera networks, the problem of calibration is crucial, specially when installed in wide areas. This paper addresses the general problem of automatic calibration and configuration of modular and scalable sensing floors. Working on training data only, the system automatically finds the spatial placement of each sensor module and estimates threshold parameters needed for people detection. Tests on several training sequences captured with a commercial sensing floor are provided to validate the method

This paper presents a novel approach to evaluate game level design strategies, applied to role playing games. Following a set of well defined guidelines, two game levels were designed for Neverwinter Nights 2 to manipulate particular emotions like boredom or flow, and tested by 13 subjects wearing a brain computer interface helmet. A set of features was extracted from the affective data logs and used to classify different parts of the gaming sessions, to verify the correspondence of the original level aims and the effective results on people emotions. The very interesting correlations observed, suggest that the technique is extensible to other similar evaluation tasks.

JAK/STAT3 signaling pathway is often deregulated in hematopoietic disorders including peripheral T-cell lymphoma. We describe two novel mechanisms leading to the constitutive activation of STAT3 in ALK- ALCL. Oncogenic JAK1 or STAT3 mutations are associated to hyperactive pSTAT3 that regulated canonical STAT3 and ATF3 genes. Moreover, synergizing JAK1 and STAT3 mutants sustain the neoplastic growth, which can be efficiently controlled in vitro and in an ALCL patient derived tumorgraft model by JAK1/2 inhibitors. We have discovered that novel chimera, displaying concomitant transcriptional and kinase activities, are power oncogenes capable to sustain via STAT3 the ALCL phenotype and can be uniquely neutralized by a novel ROS1 inhibitor. The pharmacological inhibition of JAK/STAT3 represents a novel strategy for the treatment of molecular stratified ALCL.

Following the recent Internet of Everything (IoE) trend, several general-purpose devices have been proposed to acquire as much information as possible from the environment and from people interacting with it. Among the others, sensing floors are recently attracting the interest of the research community. In this paper, we propose a new model to store and process floor data. The model does not assume a regular grid distribution of the sensing elements and is based on the ground reaction force (GRF) concept, widely used in biomechanics. It allows the correct detection and tracking of people, outperforming the common background subtraction schema adopted in the past. Several tests on a real sensing floor prototype are reported and discussed

Tracking objects moving around a person is one of the key steps in human visual augmentation: we could estimate their locations when they are out of our field of view, know their position, distance or velocity just to name a few possibilities. This is no easy task: in this paper, we show how current state-of-the-art visual tracking algorithms fail if challenged with a first-person sequence recorded from a wearable camera attached to a moving user. We propose an evaluation that highlights these algorithms' limitations and, accordingly, develop a novel approach based on visual odometry and 3D localization that overcomes many issues typical of egocentric vision. We implement our algorithm on a wearable board and evaluate its robustness, showing in our preliminary experiments an increase in tracking performance of nearly 20\% if compared to currently state-of-the-art techniques.

In this paper we propose a novel approach for egocentric video personalization in a cultural experience scenario, based on shots automatic labelling according to different semantic dimensions, such as web leveraged knowledge of the surrounded cultural Points Of Interest, information about stops and moves, both relying on geolocalization, and camera’s wearer behaviour. Moreover we present a video personalization web system based on shots multi-dimensional semantic classification, that is designed to aid the visitor to browse and to retrieve relevant information to obtain a customized video. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques for video analysis achieve good performances in unconstrained scenario and user evaluation tests confirm that our solution is useful and effective.