Research and industrial projects
(the most recent ones)
|
This project tackles the problem of high dynamic range image analysis and
metrology. The objective is to characterize, both from a geometric (the profile) and
a photometric point of view, the light distribution emitted by different automotive headlamp
beams projected on a panel, within the range of accuracy required by the European regulations.
The high accuracy in the vehicle's alignment is provided by recovering in real time
the 3D instant trajectory of a vehicle while approaching the measurement system, using natural
markers and 3D sparse feature matching with stereoscopy. After alignment, a commercial low cost CCD camera has been used.
Exploiting the camera's response function (recovered experimentally) an adaptive segmentation
algorithm has been developed that permits to perform accurate measurements
of the luminous beam profile as perceived by human eyes.
It is worth noticing that this is the first automatic prototype using a low cost CCD
sensor to assess the compliance of vehicle's headlight beams with the European regulations.
The project has been partly funded by industry
(Simpesfaip S.P.A.).
|
|
STARS - Standalone
Three-Axis
spacecraft oRientation Sensors
Current attitude determination systems on-board Earth orbiting, Nadir pointing spacecraft rely on Earth crossing
sensors which allow the detection of the Earth/atmosphere horizon and, hence, the Earth centre direction. This
information enables the computation of two attitude angles, while the angle about the sensor line-of sight remains
unknown, unless another source of attitude information is available.
The goal of STARS, carried out in collaboration with
the Aerospace Group of DIEM,
is the development of novel standalone spacecraft attitude sensors, capable of estimating
the full three-axis orientation of an Earth-orbiting satellite. The novelty of the project consists in developing
an approach that only exploits the real time analysis of image sequences of Earth surface captured from space,
without using any information from other sensors.
The challenging task is to design an algorithm for pose estimation relying on image registration and able to measure
the attitude Euler angles whitin the strict accuracy required (1 arcsec).
The project has been funded by the University of Bologna as a Strategic Project.
|
|
The increasing processing power available on PC and embedded architectures has opened the doors to real time
3D analysis of crowded scenes, where the environment under surveillance is completely covered by a loosely
synchronized camera network.
ENVISAGED aims to exploit the experience gathered by CVG in 3D people tracking and analysis
carried out with couples of cameras and
3D stereoscopy to develop a tracking people system for wide areas. The network camera system is self calibrating and the core of
the application is the people tracking technology we have developed. On top of the outcome of our group, it will be
developed a behaviour analysis system and an effective decision-making system, by two more academic units,
respectively. A Small Enterprise will develop the commercial product and a Large Enterprise is in charge of
bringing the system to the market.
|
|
The automated analysis of images and sequences plays a crucial role in most of the computer vision systems for
medical images. The assessment of pathologies or treatments is often entirely still left to human (visual) evaluation,
because of the objective difficulty to develop automated (or computer aided) assessment systems, also due to the human
health being a critical issue.
DERMOCAL aims at developing a portable and low-cost system able to achieve automatically, in vivo and routinely,
measurements of the skin surface to quantify the skin changes in dermo-cosmetic treatments. The system is based on a
2 cm2 capacitive device.
Several features have been extracted from the 3D skin topographic structure by using advanced image processing
and analysis methods.
The accuracy achieved in measuring depth and width of the skin's microrelief makes our system apt to quantify changes of
the skin surface and to be used in comparative follow-up studies in dermatology and dermocosmetics, accordingly.
The project has been partly funded by the University of Bologna.
|
|
The Computed Tomography (CT) has been developed to combine together the diagnostic capabilities of Radiology and Digital Processing,
the latter typically provided by computers. The innovative 256-Slice CT scanner offers the possibility of investigating greater volumes in a shorter amount of time,
thus improving performances in terms of image resolution and definition, in particular for vascular structures, and reducing the radiation dose for the patient.
The perfusion analysis represents a valid support to assess the effectiveness of the therapies aiming at stopping the vascularization typical of tumour lesions.
This could permit to evaluate the possible reduction of the tumour neoangiogenesis even at the early stage, before observing the modifications in size,
which occur just at a subsequent stage.
PERFEct aims at developing new methodologies based on semi-automatic analysis of a temporal sequence of 3D-TC images,
capable to enable quantitative assessments of the effectiveness of treatment for secondary hepatic lesions, through
analysing the temporal evolution of some parameters (photometric, geometrical, statistical, etc.) extracted from the
Region of Interests (ROIs) of lesion acquired in a short time and manually selected by an expert radiologist.
These parameters have to be tracked all over the images acquired throughout the treatment in order to achieve the measures
needed to quantify the neoangiogenesis degree and the effectiveness of therapy, accordingly. To this purpose, all the
algorithms are conceived for high performance distributed SIMD/MIMD architectures, so to allow even real time
4D image analysis.
The project has been partly funded by the Istituto Scientifico Romagnolo per lo Studio e la Cura dei Tumori - IRST
(The Cancer Institute of Romagna).
|
|
