Filippo Luigi Maria Milotta

An Electronic Travel Aid to Assist Blind and Visually Impaired People to Avoid Obstacles

When devices and applications provide assistance to people they become part of assistive technology. If the assistance is given to impaired people, then it is possible to refer those technologies as adaptive technologies. The main aims of these systems are substitution of physical assistants and the improvement of typical tools already available for impaired people. In this paper some benefits and examples of adaptive technology applications will be discussed. Moreover we present an adaptive technology framework to avoid obstacles to be exploited by visually impaired and blind people. The proposed assistive technology has been designed to perform vision substitution; specifically it provides Electronic Travel Aid ETA capabilities through the processing of information acquired with a depth sensor such that the user can avoid obstacles during the environment exploration. In the proposed system we require to know just the height of the sensor with respect to the ground floor to calibrate the ETA system. Experiments are performed to asses the proposed system.

RECfusion: Automatic Scene Clustering and Tracking in Videos from Multiple Sources

RECfusion is a framework devoted to the automatic processing of video data from many devices, as smartphones, tablets, webcams, surveillance cameras, etc., where all devices are thought to be connected into a 4G LTE network. Exploiting this mobile ultra-broadband connection the communication paradigm between users in the social media context can be augmented: in events like concerts, feasts, expos and so on, users become either producers than fruitors of video data. RECfusion analyzes video streams from several devices and infers semantics performing scene understanding. Key scenes are identified with relation on each video stream and all the other ones; then the system generates a video rendered from a mixage of the selected video streams. In ref. [1] a system based upon visual content popularity has been already implemented in RECfusion. In this work we propose an extension for RECfusion: a novel automatic video cluster tracking algorithm able to identify the different scenes in the gathered video streams selecting for each of them the best recording device.

Tracking error in digitized analog video: automatic detection and correction

In the last half century the most used video storage devices have been the magnetic tapes, where the information are stored in analog format based on the electromagnetism principles. When the digital technique has become the most used, it was necessary to convert analog information in digital format in order to preserve these data. Unfortunately, analog videos may be affected by drops that produce some visual defect which could be acquired during the digitization process. Despite there are many hardware to perform the digitization, just few implement the automatic correction of these defects. In some cases, drop removal is possible through the analog device. However, when a damaged already-converted video is owned, a correction based on image processing technique is the unique way to enhance the videos. In this paper, the drop, also known as “Tracking Error” or “Mistracking,” is analyzed. We propose an algorithm to detect the drops’ visual artifacts in the converted videos, as well as a digital restoration method.

Integrated three-dimensional models for noninvasive monitoring and valorization of the Morgantina silver treasure (Sicily)

Abstract. The Morgantina silver treasure belonging to the Archaeological Museum of Aidone (Sicily) was involved in a three-dimensional (3-D) survey and diagnostics campaign for monitoring the collection over time in anticipation of their temporary transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a period of 4 years. Using a multidisciplinary approach, a scientific and methodological protocol based on noninvasive techniques to achieve a complete and integrated knowledge of the precious items and their conservation state, as well as to increase their valorization, has been developed. All acquired data, i.e., 3-D models, ultraviolet fluorescence, x-ray images, and chemical information, will be made available, in an integrated way, within a web-oriented platform, which will present an in-progress tool to deepen existing archaeological knowledge and production technologies and to obtain referenced information of the conservation state before and after moving of the collection from its exposure site.

Virtual Anastylosis of Greek Sculpture as Museum Policy for Public Outreach and Cognitive Accessibility

This paper deals with a virtual anastylosis of a Greek Archaic statue from ancient Sicily and the development of a public outreach protocol for those with visual impairment or cognitive disabilities through the application of three-dimensional (3-D) printing and haptic technology. The case study consists of the marble head from Leontinoi in southeastern Sicily, acquired in the 18th century and later kept in the collection of the Museum of Castello Ursino in Catania, and a marble torso, retrieved in 1904 and since then displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Siracusa. Due to similar stylistic features, the two pieces can be dated to the end of the sixth century BC. Their association has been an open problem, largely debated by scholars, who have based their hypotheses on comparisons between pictures, but the reassembly of the two artifacts was never attempted. As a result the importance of such an artifact, which could be the only intact Archaic statue of a kouros ever found in Greek Sicily, has not fully been grasped by the public. Consequently, the curatorial dissemination of the knowledge related with such artifacts is purely based on photographic material. As a response to this scenario, the two objects have been 3-D scanned and virtually reassembled. The result has been shared digitally with the public via a web platform and, in order to include increased accessibility for the public with physical or cognitive disabilities, copies of the reassembled statue have been 3-D printed and an interactive test with the 3-D model has been carried out with a haptic device.

Low cost handheld 3D scanning for architectural elements acquisition

3D scanning has gone a long way since its first appearance in cultural heritage digitization and modeling. In the recent years some new low cost, fast, accurate emerging technologies are flooding the market. Envisioning the massive use of these cheap and easy to use devices in the next years, it is crucial to explore the possible fields of application and to test their effectiveness in terms of easiness of 3D data collection, processing, mesh resolution and metric accuracy against the size and features of the objects. In this study we focus the attention on one emerging technology, the Structure Sensor device, in order to verify a 3D pipeline acquisition on an architectural element and its details. The methodological approach is thought to define a pipeline of 3D acquisition exploiting low cost and open source technologies and foresees the assessment of this procedure in comparison with data obtained by a Time of Flight device.

Breast Shape Parametrization Through Planar Projections

In the last years, 3D scanning has replaced the low tech approach to acquire direct anthropometric measurements. These new methodologies provide a detailed digital model of the body and allow analysis of more complex information like volume, shape, curvature, and so on. The possibility to acquire the shape of soft tissues, such as the female human breast, has attracted the interest breast surgery specialists. The main aim of this work is to propose an innovative strategy to automatically analyze 3D breast shape in order to describe them within a quantitative well defined framework. In particular we propose a scanning procedure for a proper acquisition of breast surfaces by using the handheld scanner Structure Sensor, as well as a framework to process 3D digital data to extract the shape information. The proposed method consists in two main parts: firstly, the acquired digital 3D surfaces are projected in a 2D space and a set of 17 geometrical landmarks are extracted; then by exploiting Thin Plate Splines and Principal Components Analysis the original data are summarised and the breast shape is described by a small set of numerical parameters.

Breast Shape Analysis With Curvature Estimates and Principal Component Analysis for Cosmetic and Reconstructive Breast Surgery

Background Breast shape is defined utilizing mainly qualitative assessment (full, flat, ptotic) or estimates, such as volume or distances between reference points, that cannot describe it reliably. Objectives The authors quantitatively described breast shape with two parameters derived from a statistical methodology denominated by principal component analysis (PCA). Methods The authors created a heterogeneous dataset of breast shapes acquired with a commercial infrared 3-dimensional scanner on which PCA was performed. The authors plotted on a Cartesian plane the two highest values of PCA for each breast (principal components 1 and 2). Testing of the methodology on a preoperative and posttreatment surgical case and test-retest was performed by two operators. Results The first two principal components derived from PCA characterize the shape of the breast included in the dataset. The test-retest demonstrated that different operators obtain very similar values of PCA. The system is also able to identify major changes in the preoperative and posttreatment stages of a two-stage reconstruction. Even minor changes were correctly detected by the system. Conclusions This methodology can reliably describe the shape of a breast. An expert operator and a newly trained operator can reach similar results in a test/re-testing validation. Once developed and after further validation, this methodology could be employed as a good tool for outcome evaluation, auditing, and benchmarking. Level of Evidence 4

Organizing Videos Streams for Clustering and Estimation of Popular Scenes

The huge diffusion of mobile devices with embedded cameras has opened new challenges in the context of the automatic understanding of video streams acquired by multiple users during events, such as sport matches, expos, concerts. Among the other goals there is the interpretation of which visual contents are the most relevant and popular (i.e., where users look). The popularity of a visual content is an important cue exploitable in several fields that include the estimation of the mood of the crowds attending to an event, the estimation of the interest of parts of a cultural heritage, etc. In live social events people capture and share videos which are related to the event. The popularity of a visual content can be obtained through the “visual consensus” among multiple video streams acquired by the different users devices. In this paper we address the problem of detecting and summarizing the “popular scenes” captured by users with a mobile camera during events. For this purpose, we have developed a framework called RECfusion in which the key popular scenes of multiple streams are identified over time. The proposed system is able to generate a video which captures the interests of the crowd starting from a set of the videos by considering scene content popularity. The frames composing the final popular video are automatically selected from the different video streams by considering the scene recorded by the highest number of users’ devices (i.e., the most popular scene).

Description of Breast Morphology Through Bag of Normals Representation

In this work we focus on digital shape analysis of breast models to assist breast surgeon for medical and surgical purposes. A clinical procedure for female breast digital scan is proposed. After a manual ROI definition through cropping, the meshes are automatically processed. The breasts are represented exploiting “bag of normals” representation, resulting in a 64-d descriptor. PCA is computed and the obtained first 2 principal components are used to plot the breasts shape into a 2D space. We show how the breasts subject to a surgery change their representation in this space and provide a cue about the error in this estimation. We believe that the proposed procedure represents a valid solution to evaluate the results of surgeries, since one of the most important goal of the specialists is to symmetrically reconstruct breasts and an objective tool to measure the result is currently missing.