Marco Tampucci

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.

An Infrastructure for Mining Medical Multimedia Data

Biomedical research processes related to disease diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring would great benefit from advanced tools able not exclusively to store and manage multimodal data but also to process and extract significant relations and then novel knowledge from them. Indeed, making a prediction on a disease outcome usually requires considering heterogeneous pieces of information obtained from several sources which should be compared and related. Mining medical multimedia objects is aimed at discovering and making available the hidden useful knowledge embedded in collections of data and is, then, of key importance for supporting clinical decision-making. In this paper, we report current results of a medical warehouse we are developing in an integrated environment for mining clinical data acquired by different media. In particular, focus is herein given to the infrastructure of the warehouse and its current functionalities not limited to storage and management but including intelligent representation and annotation of multimedia objects.

Environmental Monitoring Integrated with a Proactive Marine Information System

In the framework of environmental monitoring, the remote detection and monitoring of oil spills at sea is an important ability due to the high demand of oil based products. This situation causes, that shipping routes are very crowded and the likelihood of oil slicks occurring is also increasing. In this paper we propose a fully integrated and inter-operable information system which can act as a valuable monitoring tool. Such a marine information system is able to monitor ship traffic and marine operators by integrating heterogeneous signals and data through sensing capabilities from a variety of electronic sensors, along with geo-positioning tools, and through a communication infrastructure. This system is able to transfer the integrated data, freely and seamlessly, between different elements of the system itself (and their users). The system also provides a set of decision support services capable of performing functionalities which can act as a support for decision makers.

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.

Long-Term Monitoring of Crack Patterns in Historic Structures Using UAVs and Planar Markers: A Preliminary Study

This paper describes how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may support the long-term monitoring of crack patterns in the context of architectural heritage preservation. In detail, this work includes: (i) a state of the art about the most used techniques in ancient structural monitoring; (ii) the description of the implemented methods, taking into account the requirements and constraints of the case study; (iii) the results of the experimentation carried out in the lab; and (iv) conclusions and future works.

Real-Time Smart Parking Systems Integration in Distributed ITS for Smart Cities

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have evolved as a key research topic in recent years, revolutionizing the overall traffic and travel experience by providing a set of advanced services and applications. These data-driven services contribute to mitigate major problems arising from the ever growing need of transport in our daily lives. Despite the progress, there is still need for an enhanced and distributed solution that can exploit the data from the available systems and provide an appropriate and real-time reaction on transportation systems. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new architecture where the intelligence is distributed and the decisions are decentralized. The proposed architecture is scalable since the incremental addition of new peripheral subsystems is supported by the introduction of gateways which requires no reengineering of the communication infrastructure. The proposed architecture is deployed to tackle the problem of traffic management inefficiency in urban areas, where traffic load is substantially increased, by vehicles moving around unnecessarily, to find a free parking space. This can be significantly reduced through the availability and diffusion of local information regarding vacant parking slots to drivers in a given area. Two types of parking systems, magnetic and vision sensor based, have been introduced, deployed, and tested in different scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture, together with the proposed algorithms, is assessed in field trials.

Towards Structural Monitoring and 3D Documentation of Architectural Heritage Using UAV

This paper describes how Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may support the architectural heritage preservation and dissemination. In detail, this work deals with the long-term monitoring of the crack pattern of historic structures, and with the reconstruction of interactive 3D scene in order to provide both the scholar and the general public with a simple and engaging tool to analyze or visit the historic structure.

A smart device for monitoring railway tracks in remote areas

In this paper we present a smart camera prototype capable of performing computer vison tasks directly on-board. The prototype is applied to real time monitoring of railways for detecting fast failures and other hazardous events to train circulation and providing notifications and early warnings to users. Experiments in a test site are reported together with encouraging preliminary results.