Pietro Pala Database Sys and Image / Video Analysis

Pietro Pala graduated with honors in 1994 in Electronic Engineering from the University of Florence, where he received his Ph.D. in Information Engineering and Telecommunications in 1998. Since 2018, he has been a full professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Florence. He teaches Databases for the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, Image and Video Analysis for the Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering, Geometric Learning for the Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence, and Information Processing Systems for the Bachelor’s Degree in Medical Radiology Techniques for Imaging and Radiotherapy.

He is a member of the Faculty Board of the Ph.D. Program in Smart Computing (jointly promoted by the Universities of Florence, Pisa, and Siena), has supervised Ph.D. theses in international co-tutorship, and has served as an external reviewer for Ph.D. theses at foreign institutions. He was President of the Unified Council of the Degrees in Computer Engineering from 2014 to 2022. He is currently the delegate for Quality Assurance of the School of Engineering.

Pietro Pala is a member of the Media Integration and Communication Center, MICC (center of excellence of the Ministry of Education, University and Research), and the Rector’s delegate of the University of Florence to the Steering Committee of the Regional Center for Research, Training, and Technology Transfer on Big Data & Artificial Intelligence (CBDAI). He has been the scientific director of several research and technology transfer projects funded by European and national calls. Among the most recent are the Social Museum and Smart Tourism project (SMST, completed in December 2023 and funded under the National Technological Clusters line, Ministerial Decree 257/Ric of May 30, 2012) and Improving the customer experience in stores by intelligent computer vision (Principal Investigator, PRIN I-MALL, completed in August 2023, funded under the projects of Relevant National Interest line).

Pietro Pala’s research develops robust, efficient, and transferable visual intelligence for challenging real-world environments. He focuses on neuromorphic event cameras, multimodal and cross-domain representation learning, and privacy-aware healthcare applications. His contributions include noise-resilient event representations, RGB-event drone datasets, motion–appearance disentanglement, bio-inspired domain generalization, cross-modal transfer between ultrasound and MRI, language-guided medical segmentation, and automatic pain assessment.

Pietro Pala is a Senior Member of the IEEE and performs scientific service as Associate Editor for the Springer journal Multimedia Systems and for the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications.

Publications in the last year

• Parameter-efficient Vision Transformer adaptation for stem quality classification from smartphone forest images. N Biondi, S Ricci, N Arati, M Nocetti, G Aminti, P Pala, M Brunetti. Smart Agricultural Technology, 2026
• CLIP Feature Selection Mechanism via Sparse Autoencoder for Generalized Deepfake Detection. L Berlincioni, A Ciamarra, P Pala, R Caldelli, A Del Bimbo. IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security, 2025
• Fred: The florence rgb-event drone dataset. G Magrini, N Marini, F Becattini, L Berlincioni, N Biondi, P Pala, AD Bimbo. Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International conference on multimedia, 13170-13176, 2025
• Drone detection with event cameras. G Magrini, L Berlincioni, F Becattini, L Cultrera, P Pala. IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops, 2025
• Spike-TBR: A noise resilient neuromorphic event representation. G Magrini, F Becattini, L Cultrera, L Berlincioni, P Pala, A Del Bimbo. Pattern Recognition Letters 196, 198-205, 2025
• Pain level estimation from videos by analyzing the dynamics of facial landmarks with a spatio-temporal graph neural network. F Alhamdoosh, P Pala, S Berretti. IEEE Transactions on Biometrics, Behavior, and Identity Science, 2025
• Ev-flying: an event-based dataset for in-the-wild recognition of flying objects. G Magrini, F Becattini, G Colombo, P Pala. IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2025
• An ai-powered multimodal interaction system for engaging with digital art: A human-centered approach to hci. A Ferracani, S Ricci, F Principi, G Becchi, N Biondi, A Del Bimbo, M Bertini, P Pala. International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 281-294, 2025
• Feature Hallucination via Privileged Information for Neuromorphic Face Analysis. L Berlincioni, L Cultrera, G Magrini, F Becattini, P Pala, A Del Bimbo. International Conference on Pattern Recognition, 413-426, 2024
• Neuromorphic drone detection: an event-rgb multimodal approach. G Magrini, F Becattini, P Pala, A Del Bimbo, A Porta. European Conference on Computer Vision, 259-275