Recent news
On automatic reading of handwriting (What the writing hand could tell to the reading eye)
Vehicles that Learn by Observing How We Drive: Multidisciplinary Explorations in Human-Centered Driver Assistance
Developmental Agents for Vision
Magenta SRL and MICC demo at ICIAP 2011
EVA 2012 Florence - Electronic Imaging the Visual Arts
Computer Recognition of Human Activities, Objects and their Interactions
Last months lectures
Scientists and researchers from around the world have regularly lectures at our Center.
On automatic reading of handwriting (What the writing hand could tell to the reading eye)
by
Vehicles that Learn by Observing How We Drive: Multidisciplinary Explorations in Human-Centered Driver Assistance
Analysis and development of a learning application for people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) according to the Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) method
Next lecture at MICC: "On automatic reading of handwriting" by Angelo Marcelli, director of NCL
Next lecture at MICC: "Vehicles that Learn by Observing How We Drive" by Mohan M. Trivedi of LISA
Next lecture at MICC: "Developmental Agents for Vision" by Marco Gori of IED, University of Siena
Magenta SRL and MICC participated at the 16th edition of the ICIAP 2011 with a live demo on traffic monitoring
EVA 2012 Conference in Florence: the foremost European Electronic Imaging Events in the Visual Arts
center of excellence
IM3I: immersive multimedia interfaces
Accurate Evaluation of HER-2 Amplification in FISH Images
Continuous Recovery for real time PTZ localization and mapping
euTV: adaptive media channels
Onna: a natural interface system for virtual reconstruction
blog
MICC Research
The MICC is headed by prof. Alberto Del Bimbo. Its research directions are: automatic video annotation, content based retrieval, cultural heritage, intelligent videosurveillance, internet applications, natural interaction.
Automatic video annotation
IM3I: immersive multimedia interfaces
May 19, 2010
The IM3I project addresses the needs of a new generation of media and communication industry that has to confront itself not only with changing technologies, but also with the radical change in media consumption behaviour. IM3I will enable new ways of accessing and presenting media content to users, and new ways for users to interact with services, offering a natural and transparent way to deal with the complexities of interaction, while hiding them from the user.
Vidivideo: improving accessibility of videos
May 18, 2010
The VidiVideo project takes on the challenge of creating a substantially enhanced semantic access to video, implemented in a search engine. The outcome of the project is an audio-visual search engine, composed of two parts: an automatic annotation part, that runs off-line, where detectors for more than 1000 semantic concepts are collected in a thesaurus to process and automatically annotate the video and an interactive part that provides a video search engine for both technical and non-technical users.
Automatic trademark detection and recognition in sports videos
April 7, 2010
The availability of measures of appearance of trademarks and logos in a video is important in fields of marketing and sponsoring. These statistics can, in fact, be used by the sponsors to estimate the number TV viewers that noticed them and then evaluate the effects of the sponsorship. The goal of the ongoing project is to create a semi-automatic system for detection, tracking and recognition of pre-defined brands and trademarks in broadcast television. The number of appearances of a logo, its position, size and duration will be recorded to derive indexes and statistics that can be used for marketing analysis.
Video event classification using bag-of-words and string kernels
April 6, 2010
The recognition of events in videos is a relevant and challenging task of automatic semantic video analysis. At present one of the most successful frameworks, used for object recognition tasks, is the bag-of-words (BoW) approach. However it does not model the temporal information of the video stream. We are working at a novel method to introduce temporal information within the BoW approach by modeling a video clip as a sequence of histograms of visual features, computed from each frame using the traditional BoW model.
Human action categorization in unconstrained videos
April 6, 2010
Building a general human activity recognition and classification system is a challenging problem, because of the variations in environment, people and actions. In fact environment variation can be caused by cluttered or moving background, camera motion, illumination changes. People may have different size, shape and posture appearance. Recently, interest-points based models have been successfully applied to the human action classification problem, because they overcome some limitations of holistic models such as the necessity of performing background subtraction and tracking. We are working at a novel method based on the visual bag-of-words model and on a new spatio-temporal descriptor.
Content based retrieval
Accurate Evaluation of HER-2 Amplification in FISH Images
May 17, 2010
In this research we present a system that supports accurate estimation of the ratio of HER-2 over CEP-17 dots in FISH images of breast tissue samples. Compared to previous work, the system incorporates a model to associate with each segmented nucleus a reliability score that estimates the confidence of the measure of the ratio of HER-2 over CEP-17 dots within the nucleus.
Image forensics using SIFT features
April 6, 2010
In many application scenarios digital images play a basic role and often it is important to assess if their content is realistic or has been manipulated to mislead watcher’s opinion. Image forensics tools provide answers to similar questions. We are working on a novel method that focuses in particular on the problem of detecting if a feigned image has been created by cloning an area of the image onto another zone to make a duplication or to cancel something awkward.
SIFTPose: local pose estimation from a single scale invariant keypoint
March 29, 2010
The aim of this project is to develop a new method of estimating the poses of imaged scene surfaces provided that they can be locally approximated by their tangent planes. Our approach performs an accurate direct estimation by exploiting the robustness of scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). The results are representative of the state of the art for this challenging task.
Cultural heritage
Enrich
January 24, 2011
Enrich is an EContentPlus Project funded by the EC. It contributes to develop an integrated version of Manuscriptorium digital library to provide direct access to old documentary heritage in digital format (manuscripts, incunabula, old books) throughout Europe's cultural institutions. Manuscriptorium integrates xml schema TEIP5 format for electronic description of manuscripts based on TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), OAI, online tools to achieve thematic collections and virtual documents, multilingual ontologies and semantic web. The Laboratory has dealt mainly with the analysis of thematic collections and virtual documents and studied harvesting of metadata formats.
DanThe. Digital and Tuscan heritage
January 18, 2011
The project involves the design and implementation of a regional website that collects and organizes information of digital collections regarding cultural heritage, produced by different cultural institutions (museums, libraries, archives, universities and superintendents). The project is promoted by the Tuscany Region and it is related to other national and international projects working on cultural heritage (Michael Project, Project Minerva, CulturItalia).
Intelligent videosurveillance
Continuous Recovery for real time PTZ localization and mapping
May 11, 2011
We propose a method for real time recovering from tracking failure in monocular localization and mapping with a Pan Tilt Zoom camera (PTZ). The method automatically detects and seamlessly recovers from tracking failure while preserving map integrity. By extending recent advances in the PTZ localization and mapping, the system can quickly and continuously resume tracking failures by determining the best way to task two different localization modalities. The trade-off involved when choosing between the two modalities is captured by maximizing the information expected to be extracted from the scene map.
ORUSSI. Optimal Road sUrveillance System based on Scalable vIdeo
April 20, 2011
The project focuses on road monitoring through a network of roadside sensors (mainly cameras) that can be dynamically deployed and added to the surveillance systems in an efficient way. The main objective of the project is to develop an optimized platform offering innovative real-time media (video and data) applications for road monitoring in real scenarios.
Joint laboratory MICC – Thales
April 4, 2011
MICC, Media Integration and Communication Center of the University of Florence, and Thales Italy have established a partnership to create a joint laboratory between university and company in order to research and develop innovative solutions per safety, sensitive sites, critical infrastructure and transport.
Mnemosyne: smart environments for cultural heritage
March 24, 2011
Mnemosyne is a research project about the study and experimentation of smart environments which adopts natural interaction paradigms for the protection and promotion of artistic and cultural heritage by the analysis of visitors behaviors and activities.
Scale Invariant 3D Multi-Person Tracking with a PTZ camera
July 14, 2010
This research aims to realize a videosurveillance system for real-time 3D tracking of multiple people moving over an extended area, as seen from a rotating and zooming camera. The proposed method exploits multi-view image matching techniques to obtain dynamic-calibration of the camera and track many ground targets simultaneously, by slewing the video sensor from target to target and zooming in and out as necessary.
Optimal face detection and tracking
June 18, 2010
The project’s goal is to develop a reliable face detector and tracker for indoor video surveillance. The problem that we have been asked to deal with is to provide good quality face images of people entering restricted areas. Those images are going to be used for face recognition, and a feedback will be provided from the face recognition system to state if the person has been recognized or not.
Internet applications
euTV: adaptive media channels
April 5, 2011
euTV is a SME project whose objectives are to connect publicly available multimedia information streams under a unifying framework and to allow publishers of audio-visual content to decide themselves whether the content will be available and for how much. The project deals with the creation of effective tools to organise, manage and link digital assets, in order to maximise accessibility and reduce cost issues for everyone concerned, from content managers to online content consumers.
MAC-GEO: the effects of geothermal power in Tuscany
March 25, 2011
A technology transfer project for the Regione Toscana in order to provide a solution to predict the effects of geothermal power both in the same basin and the surrounding environment in some areas of Tuscany.
LIT: Lexicon of the Italian Television
July 20, 2010
LIT (Lexicon of the Italian Television) is a project conceived by the Accademia della Crusca, the leading research institution on the Italian language, in collaboration with CLIEO (Center for theoretical and historical Linguistics: Italian, European and Oriental languages), with the aim of studying frequencies of the Italian lexicon used in television content and targets the specific sector of web applications for linguistic research. The corpus of transcriptions is constituted approximately by 170 hours of random television recordings transmitted by the national broadcaster RAI (Italian Radio Television) during the year 2006.
Mediateca di Palazzo Medici Riccardi
March 29, 2010
The Mediateca Medicea is a digital archive relating to Palazzo Medici Riccardi, one of the most important buildings in Florence, which now belongs to the Provincial Authority and houses the administrative offices. The Mediateca Medicea is designed in particular for academics and experts in the fields of art, history, the humanities, photography and the conservation of the cultural heritage, but also for students or scholars following up specific strands of research.
Natural interaction
Onna: a natural interface system for virtual reconstruction
March 29, 2011
A technology transfer project for an upcoming international exhibition about the story of Onna, an italian town near to L’Aquila, which was affected by the earthquake during 2009. The project involves the study and development of an interactive system which adopts the paradigm of the natural interaction in order to allow users to access and consult multimedia contents.
PointAt system at Palazzo Medici Riccardi
November 17, 2010
Palazzo Medici Riccardi is one of the most important museums in Florence: in its small chapel, it hosts the famous fresco La cavalcata dei magi (The Journey of the Magi) by Benozzo Gozzoli (1421–1497). The PointAt system’s goal is to stimulate the visitors to interact with a digital version of the fresco and, at the same time, make them interact in the same way they will in the chapel, reinforcing their real experience with the fresco. That is to use information technology to make teaching attractive and effective.
TANGerINE Tales. Multi-role digital storymaking natural interface
October 4, 2010
TANGerINE Tales is a natural interface for multi-role digital storymaking based on the TANGerINE platform. TANGerINE Tales lets children create and tell stories combining landscapes and characters chosen by themselves. The result concerns educational psychology in terms of respect of roles, development of literacy and of narrative skills.
Multi-user interactive table for neurocognitive and neuromotor rehabilitation
March 29, 2010
This project concerns the design and development of a multi-touch system that provides innovative tools for neurocognitive and neuromotor rehabilitation for senile diseases. This project comes to life thanks to the collaboration between MICC, the Faculty of Psychology (University of Florence) and Montedomini A.S.P., a public agency for self sufficient and disabled elders that offers welfare and health care services.
TANGerINE Grape
March 26, 2010
TANGerINE Grape is a collaborative knowledge sharing system that can be used through natural and tangible interfaces. The final goal is to enable users to enrich their knowledge through the attainment of information both from digital libraries and from the knowledge shared by other users involved in the same interaction session.
Multi-user environment for semantic search of multimedia contents
March 26, 2010
This research project exploits new technologies (multi-touch table and iPhone) in order to develop a multi-user, multi-role and multi-modal system for multimedia content search, annotation and organization. As use case we considered the field of broadcast journalism where editors and archivists work together in creating a film report using archive footage.