Publications

This paper reports a novel approach to deal with the problem of Object and Scene recognition extending the traditional Bag of Words approach in two ways. Firstly, a dataset independent method of summarizing local features, based on multivariate Gaussian descriptors, is employed. Secondly, a recently proposed classification technique, particularly suited for high dimensional feature spaces without any dimensionality reduction step, allows to effectively exploit these features. Experiments are performed on two publicly available datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach when compared to state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper we propose an approach for Document Layout Analysis based on local correlation features. We identify and extract illustrations in digitized documents by learning the discriminative patterns of textual and pictorial regions. The proposal has been demonstrated to be effective on historical datasets and to outperform the state-of-the-art in presence of challenging documents with a large variety of pictorial elements.

Metastatic spread to the liver is a frequent complication of colorectal cancer (CRC), occurring in almost half of the cases, for which personalized treatment strategies are highly desirable. To this aim, it has been proven that patient-derived mouse xenografts (PDX) of liver-metastatic CRC can be used to discover new therapeutic targets and determinants of drug resistance. To identify gene fusions in RNA-Seq data obtained from such PDX samples, we propose a novel pipeline that tackles the following issues: (i) discriminating human from murine RNA, to filter out transcripts contributed by the mouse stroma that supports the PDX; (ii) increasing sensitivity in case of suboptimal RNA-Seq coverage; (iii) prioritizing the detected chimeric transcripts by molecular features of the fusion and by functional relevance of the involved genes; (iv) providing appropriate sequence information for subsequent validation of the identified fusions. The pipeline, built on top of Chimerascan(R.Iyer, 2011) and deFuse(McPherson, 2011) aligner tools, was successfully applied to RNASeq data from 11 PDX samples. Among the 299 fusion genes identified by the aforementioned softwares, five were selected since passed all the filtering stages implemented into the proposed pipeline resulting as biologically relevant fusions. Three of them were experimentally confirmed.

Surveillance systems can really benefit from the integration of multiple and heterogeneous sensors. In this paper we describe an innovative sensing floor. Thanks to its low cost and ease of installation, the floor is suitable for both private and public environments, from narrow zones to wide areas. The floor is made adding a sensing layer below commercial floating tiles. The sensor is scalable, reliable, and completely invisible to the users. The temporal and spatial resolutions of the data are high enough to identify the presence of people, to recognize their behavior and to detect events in a privacy compliant way. Experimental results on a real prototype implementation confirm the potentiality of the framework.

Techniques based on Bag Of Words approach represent images by quantizing local descriptors and summarizing their distribution in a histogram. Dierently, in this paper we describe an image as multivariate Gaussian distribution, estimated over the extracted local descriptors. The estimated distribution is mapped to a high-dimensional descriptor, by concatenating the mean vector and the projection of the covariance matrix on the Euclidean space tangent to the Riemannian manifold. To deal with large scale datasets and high dimensional feature spaces the Stochastic Gradient Descent solver is adopted. The experimental results on Caltech-101 and ImageCLEF2011 show that the method obtains competitive performance with state-of-the art approaches.

In this paper we propose to integrate the recently introduces ORB descriptors in the currently favored approach for image classification, that is the Bag of Words model. In particular the problem to be solved is to provide a clustering method able to deal with the binary string nature of the ORB descriptors. We suggest to use a k-means like approach, called k-majority, substituting Euclidean distance with Hamming distance and majority selected vector as the new cluster center. Results combining this new approach with other features are provided over the ImageCLEF 2011 dataset.

The costs associated with the management of healthcare systems have been subject to continuous scrutiny for some time now, with a view to reducing them without affecting the quality as perceived by final users. A number of different solutions have arisen based on centralisation of healthcare services and investments in Information Technology (IT). One such example is centralised management of pharmaceuticals among a group of hospitals which is then incorporated into the different steps of the automation supply chain. This paper focuses on a new picking workstation available for insertion in automated pharmaceutical distribution centres and which is capable of replacing manual workstations and bringing about improvements in working time. The workstation described uses a sophisticated computer vision algorithm to allow picking of very diverse and complex objects randomly available on a belt or in bins. The algorithm exploits state-of-the-art feature descriptors for an approach that is robust against occlusions and distracting objects, and invariant to scale, rotation or illumination changes. Finally, the performance of the designed picking workstation is tested in a large experimentation focused on the management of pharmaceutical items.

In this paper, the problem of automatic people removal from digital photographs is addressed. Removing unintended people from a scene can be very useful to focus further steps of image analysis only on the object of interest, A supervised segmentation algorithm is presented and tested in several scenarios.

Several papers addressed ellipse detection as a first step for several computer vision applications, but most of the proposed solutions are too slow to be applied in real time on large images or with limited hardware resources, as in the case of mobile devices. This demo is based on a novel algorithm for fast and accurate ellipse detection. The proposed algorithm relies on a careful selection of arcs which are candidate to form ellipses and on the use of Hough transform to estimate parameters in a decomposed space. The demo will show it working on a commercial smart-phone. © 2013 IEEE.