Marco Reggiannini

Thesaurus project: design of new autonomous underwater vehicles for documentation and protection of underwater archaeological sites

The Thesaurus Project, funded by the Regione Toscana, combines humanistic and technological research aiming at developing a new generation of cooperating Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and at documenting ancient and modern Tuscany shipwrecks. Technological research will allow performing an archaeological exploration mission through the use of a swarm of autonomous, smart and self-organizing underwater vehicles. Using acoustic communications, these vehicles will be able to exchange each other data related to the state of the exploration and then to adapt their behavior to improve the survey. The archival research and archaeological survey aim at collecting all reports related to the underwater evidences and the events of sinking occurred in the sea of Tuscany. The collected data will be organized in a specific database suitably modeled.

Underwater Scene Understanding by Optical and Acoustic Data Integration

A new method is proposed to integrate 3D optical and acoustic images relative to the same underwater environment. The combination of optical and acoustic sensors in terms of uniform reference system, geo-referencing and time allows: (i) integration cascade (operational level), (ii) safety data acquisition in various domains (distance from ground, turbid water, vegetation, etc.), (iii) replanning of missions in progress. Furthermore, data fusion can be faced according to different approaches: (a) stratification of referenced data layers, (b) correlation of quantities of different nature, (c) comparison of extracted features: 2D geometries (segments, elementary curves) and 3D (planes, simple surfaces), repetitive patterns, (d) integration of semantic information, (e) template matching for recognizing known structures, (f) creation and refinement of probability maps as a measure of optical (geometry, texture) and acoustic (elevation or reflectivity maps) properties. A set of geometrical and textural feature ...

Archaeology oriented optical acquisitions through MARTA AUV during ARROWS European project demonstration

The three-years European FP7 ARROWS project (ARchaeological RObot systems for the Worlds Seas) concluded at the end of August 2015. A heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs has been created in the framework of ARROWS: these are both new prototypes and well known commercial vehicles. In the paper MARTA modular AUV is described: MARTA is a new prototype specifically designed during the project. Its navigation and payload capabilities are discussed and some of the results, mainly optical acquisitions for the archaeologists, reached during the first official demo of the ARROWS European project (Sicily, Italy, May and June 2015) are reported and commented.

Towards a Robust System Helping Underwater Archaeologists Through the Acquisition of Geo-referenced Optical and Acoustic Data

In the framework of the ARROWS project September 2012 - August 2015, a venture funded by the European Commission, several modular Autonomous Underwater Vehicles AUV have been developed to the main purposes of mapping, diagnosing, cleaning, and securing underwater and coastal archaeological sites. These AUVs consist of modular mobile robots, designed and manufactured according to specific suggestions formulated by a pool of archaeologists featuring long-standing experience in the field of Underwater Cultural Heritage preservation. The vehicles are typically equipped with acoustic modems to communicate during the dive and with different payload devices to sense the environment. The selected sensors represent appealing choices to the oceanographic engineer since they provide complementary information about the surrounding environment. The maini¾?topics discussed in this paper concern i performing a systematic mapping of the marine seafloors, ii processing the output maps to detect and classify potential archaeological targets and finally iii developing dissemination systems with the purpose of creating virtual scenes as a photorealistic and informative representation of the surveyed underwater sites.

Remote Sensing for Maritime Monitoring and Vessel Prompt Identification

The main purpose of the work described in this paper concerns the development of a platform dedicated to sea surveillance, capable of detecting and identifying illegal maritime traffic. This platform results from the cascade implementation of several image processing algorithms that take as input Radar or Optical maps captured by satellite-borne sensors. More in detail, the processing chain is dedicated to (i) the detection of vessel targets in the input map, (ii) the refined estimation of the vessel most descriptive geometrical features and, finally, (iii) the estimation of the kinematic status of the vessel. This platform will represent a new tool for combating unauthorized fishing, irregular migration and related smuggling activities.

Understanding underwater archaeological scenarios by optical and acoustic sensing tools

Underwater seafloors represent a huge archive of manmade artefacts, a cultural heritage whose abandon process started since man has been able to travel by the waters. In order to put this heritage under safeguard and preservation archaeologists require and request for technological support provided by the scientific community. Automated procedures tailored for the purposes of manmade object recognition in the underwater scenario represent the main topic discussed in this work. In particular the authors propose a set of procedures that enables to extract meaningful insights about the inspected environment and that can be exploited to assign a label of interest, in terms of cultural significance, to the surveyed areas. Furthermore the authors introduce a sketch of a framework according to which the identification of interesting areas on the seafloor may be implemented in terms of a Bayes decision system.

Marine virtual environment to access underwater cultural heritage

In the field of underwater cultural heritage, advanced technologies and tools are under development aiming at discovering, mapping, studying and securing archaeological sites. In this paper, we describe the system developed in order to disseminate the data collected during underwater exploration and to provide, to the archeologist, an effective tool to explore and analyze each explored underwater archaeological site. With this aim, the system exploits collected raw data together with the results of the detailed analysis and embeds them in a 3D interactive and informative scene. The scene is accessible both by the experts (for research purposes) and by general public (for dissemination of the underwater cultural heritage).