F. Stanco

University of Catania | UNICT · Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (DMI)

Augmented reality is the process of using technology to superimpose video, images, text or sound onto what a person can already see with their own eyes in the reality around them. It is enough to have a smartphone or tablet to change the reality in front of you. In fact, by means of an app, the user can display on his or her device content related...

In recent years, digital technologies and serious game have widely affected the cultural heritage sector, offering incredible opportunities to enhance the experiential value of heritage assets and improve cultural activities. Due to pandemic and the closure of museums the demand for new digital remote solutions for Cultural Heritage has seen a grea...

Steganography is the ancient art of concealing messages into data. High research interest has grown over the last years, however, techniques in literature are only focused on standard and in some way legacy multimedia formats (e.g., H.264). Moreover, most video steganography techniques are based on concealing data into contents of each frame employ...

The production process of a wafer in the semiconductor industry consists of several phases such as a diffusion and associated defectivity test, parametric test, electrical wafer sort test, assembly and associated defectivity tests, final test, and burn-in. Among these, the fault detection phase is critical to maintain the low number and the impact...

The identification of printed materials is a critical and challenging issue for security purposes, especially when it comes to documents such as banknotes, tickets, or rare collectable cards: eligible targets for ad hoc forgery. State-of-the-art methods require expensive and specific industrial equipment, while a low-cost, fast, and reliable soluti...

Colonoscopy is currently the most effective screening method to find precancerous colon polyps and plan their removal. Computer-aided polyp detection can reduce polyp miss detection rates and help doctors find the most critical regions to pay attention to. The challenge in detecting polyps is due to the polyp’s morphology and size, and these fall i...

After thirty years of the GIF file format, today is becoming more popular than ever: being a great way of communication for friends and communities on Instant Messengers and Social Networks. While being so popular, the original compression method to encode GIF images have not changed a bit. On the other hand popularity means that storage saving bec...

This paper is the editorial of the virtual special issue (VSI) ”Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Cultural Heritage”, of which the authors of this paper have been the guest editors. It aims to bring together the work of experts from the fields of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence and that of cultural herit...

The aim of this study was to confirm the identities of numerous portraits attributed to the composer Vincenzo Bellini by using 3D-to-2D projection. This study also followed on from earlier research on three death masks of Bellini, the results of which had shown that the wax mask in Catania's Bellini museum best represented Bellini's face compared t...

Nowadays mineralogical and petrographic sciences represent important resources for the understanding of natural and cultural heritage. Indeed, the implication in economic and social scenario, from the exploitation of geo-resources to the natural stone application in architecture, involves the whole society. In this context, scientific museums are c...

Color specification is the process of measuring the color of a sample in a given color space. We focused onto the Munsell color space as archaeologists are used to employ the so called Munsell Soil Color Charts (MSCCs) directly in the excavation sites. For these scholars and researchers, being enabled to perform Munsell color specification in an au...

This paper is focused on the valorization and the communication about the Mother church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in the Ancient Misterbianco (Catania), one of the rare surviving vestiges of the eruption of Mount Etna in 1669 and the earthquake in Val di Noto in 1693. The project, starting from a 3D digital surveys carried out through reality-bas...

In the last decade food understanding has become a very attractive topic. This has implied the growing demand of Computer Vision algorithms for automatic diet assessment to treat or prevent food related diseases. However, the intrinsic variability of food, makes the research in this field incredibly challenging. Although many papers about classific...

Classification of hyperspectral images is one of the main problem in the research field of Remote Sensing. With the advantage of spectral and spatial information, it is possible to distinguish effectively different materials and terrains. In the last decade, the intensive employing of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for classification and segme...

Munsell Soil Charts are a very common tool used by archaeologists for the color specification task. Charts are usually employed directly on cultural heritage sites to identify color of soils and collected artifacts. However, charts are designed to be used specifying the color through subjective perception of users, by visual mean, in a time-consumi...

Munsell soil charts are commonly used in archaeology to identify colors of soils and artifacts during excavations. In situ, the procedure is done by visual means and in a very subjective way, resulting in a time consuming and error‐prone approach. To overcome these limitations, an original application has been developed: the automatic recognition o...

ARCA stands for Automatic Recognition of Color for Archaeology. Color specification is a common and critical issue for archaeologists, motivated by the need to identify and catalogue color names. For these purposes, Munsell Soil Color Charts (MSCCs) are widely employed. However, archaeologists are used to perform color specification by visual means...

ARCA stands for Automatic Recognition of Color for Archaeology. Color specification is a common and critical issue for archaeologists, motivated by the need to identify and catalogue color names. For these purposes, Munsell Soil Color Charts (MSCCs) are widely employed. However, archaeologists are used to perform color specification by visual means...

Color re-indexing is one of main approaches for improving the loss-less compression of color indexed images. Zero-order entropy reduction of indexes matrix is the key to obtain high compression ratio. However, obtaining the optimal re-indexed palette is a challenging problem that cannot be solved by brute-force approaches. In this paper we propose...

Traditional methods for early detection of melanoma rely on the visual analysis of the skin lesions performed by a dermatologist. The analysis is based on the so-called ABCDE (Asymmetry, Border irregularity, Colour variegation, Diameter, Evolution) criteria, although confirmation is obtained through biopsy performed by a pathologist. The proposed m...

Key role in the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases plays the balanced nutrition together with a proper diet. The conventional dietary assessment methods are time-consuming, expensive and prone to errors. New technology-based methods that provide reliable and convenient dietary assessment, have emerged during the last decade. The advances i...

Key role in the prevention of diet-related chronic diseases plays the balanced nutrition together with a proper diet. The conventional dietary assessment methods are time-consuming, expensive and prone to errors. New technology-based methods that provide reliable and convenient dietary assessment, have emerged during the last decade. The advances i...

Munsell Soil Charts are commonly used in archaeology to identify colors of soils and artifacts excavations. The identification, based on the perception of the observer, is totally subjective. To overcome this limit, an original application has been developed, ARCA: Automatic Recognition of Color for Archaeology. ARCA moves from Munsell Charts but i...

Background Breast shape is defined utilizing mainly qualitative assessment (full, flat, ptotic) or estimates, such as volume or distances between reference points, that cannot describe it reliably. Objectives We will quantitatively describe breast shape with two parameters derived from a statistical methodology denominated principal component anal...

One of the most common physical damage in silver gelatin prints is losses which occurs due to many deterioration factors (i.e. rodent attack, improper handling, fire, etc.). Conventionally, conservators compensated for the losses by making paper infills. While this method improves the physical structure of the treated print, it creates an unaccepta...

The huge diffusion of mobile devices with embedded cameras has opened new challenges in the context of the automatic understanding of video streams acquired by multiple users during events, such as sport matches, expos, concerts. Among the other goals there is the interpretation of which visual contents are the most relevant and popular (i.e., wher...

Archaeologists are used to employing the Munsell Soil Charts on cultural heritage sites to identify colors of soils and retrieved artifacts. The standard practice of Munsell estimation exploits the Soil Charts by visual means. This procedure is error prone, time consuming and very subjective. To obtain an accurate estimation the process should be r...

Traditional methods for early detection of melanoma rely upon a dermatologist who visually analyzes skin lesion using the so called ABCDE (Asym-metry, Border irregularity, Color variegation, Diameter, Evolution) criteria even though conclusive confirmation is obtained through biopsy performed by pathologist. The proposed method shows a bio-inspired...

In this work we focus on digital shape analysis of breast models to assist breast surgeon for medical and surgical purposes. A clinical procedure for female breast digital scan is proposed. After a manual ROI definition through cropping, the meshes are automatically processed. The breasts are represented exploiting "bag of normals" representation,...

This paper deals with a virtual anastylosis of a Greek Archaic statue from ancient Sicily and the development of a public outreach protocol for those with visual impairment or cognitive disabilities through the application of three-dimensional (3-D) printing and haptic technology. The case study consists of the marble head from Leontinoi in southea...

This paper deals with a virtual anastylosis of a Greek Archaic statue from ancient Sicily and the development of a public outreach protocol for those with visual impairment or cognitive disabilities through the application of three-dimensional (3-D) printing and haptic technology. The case study consists of the marble head from Leontinoi in southea...

The Morgantina silver treasure belonging to the Archaeological Museum of Aidone (Sicily) was involved in a three-dimensional (3-D) survey and diagnostics campaign for monitoring the collection over time in anticipation of their temporary transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a period of 4 years. Using a multidisciplinary approa...

In the last years, 3D scanning has replaced the low tech approach to acquire direct anthropometric measurements. These new methodologies provide a detailed digital model of the body and allow analysis of more complex information like volume, shape, curvature, and so on. The possibility to acquire the shape of soft tissues, such as the female human...

Automatic food understanding from images is an interesting challenge with applications in different domains. In particular, food intake monitoring is becoming more and more important because of the key role that it plays in health and market economies. In this paper, we address the study of food image processing from the perspective of Computer Vis...

The regular format for ancient works of literature was the papyrus roll. Recently many efforts to perform virtual restoration of this archeological artifact have been done. In fact the case of ancient rolled papyrus is very intriguing. Old papyruses are the substrates of very important historical information, probably being the use of papyrus dated...

RECfusion is a framework devoted to the automatic processing of video data from many devices, as smartphones, tablets, we-bcams, surveillance cameras, etc., where all devices are thought to be connected into a 4G LTE network. Exploiting this mobile ultra-broadband connection the communication paradigm between users in the social media context can b...

RECfusion is a framework devoted to the automatic processing of video data from many devices, as smartphones, tablets, webcams, surveillance cameras, etc., where all devices are thought to be connected into a 4G LTE network. Exploiting this mobile ultra-broadband connection the communication paradigm between users in the social media context can be...

This work aims to the production of inclusive technologies to help people affected by diseases. In particular, we present a pipeline to convert Braille documents, acquired with a mobile device, into classic printed text. The mobile application has been thought as support for assistants (e.g., in the education domain) and parents of blind and partia...

The Morgantina silver Treasure belonging to the collections of the Archaeological Museum of Aidone (Sicily) were involved in a 3D survey and diagnostics campaign for monitoring over time of the finds, in anticipation of their temporary transfer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, for a period of four years. According to a multidisciplina...

In historical documentaries, video material often is not available. For this reason they are mainly made by using static material such as old photographs. To make this material more endearing and dynamic an effect known as “Ken Burns Effect” can be applied to the static images. It consists in a mix of panning and zooming effect applied to different...

An important feature of the Minoan culture is the pottery of Ka-mares style, that documents the Cretan cultural production between the first half of the II millennium BC. This high level painted pro-duction characterized by the combination of several diverse motifs, presents an enormous decorative repertoire. The extraordinary vari-ety of combinati...

In the last years automatic food image understanding has become an important research challenge for the society. This is because of the serious impact that food intake has in human life. Food recognition engines, can help the monitoring of the patient diet and his food intake habits. Nevertheless, distinguish among di�erent classes of food is not t...

In recent years the virtual restoration of ancient papyri has become an important research challenge. This is because the papyrus degradation is often very serious, so physical analysis could damage the artifact. In this paper we address the problem of virtual unrolling to read papyrus scroll by avoiding a dangerous physical unrolling. To this aim...

When devices and applications provide assistance to people they become part of assistive technology. If the assistance is given to impaired people, then it is possible to refer those technologies as adaptive technologies. The main aims of these systems are substitution of physical assistants and the improvement of typical tools already available fo...

The microscopic description of ancient pottery is widely used for the fabric definition, classification and provenance assessment. In most cases, however, the description is qualitative. An improvement of the study of archaeological pottery needs a more objective approach with quantitative analysis. In classical scientific literature, the structura...

It is well-known that people love food. However, an insane diet can cause problems in the general health of the people. Since health is strictly linked to the diet, advanced computer vision tools to recognize food images (e.g. acquired with mobile/wearable cameras), as well as their properties (e.g., calories), can help the diet monitoring by provi...

In the last half century the most used video storage devices have been the magnetic tapes, where the information are stored in analog format based on the electromagnetism principles. When the digital technique has become the most used, it was necessary to convert analog information in digital format in order to preserve these data. Unfortunately, a...

The aim of this work is related to the production of inclusive technologies to help people affected by diseases, like the blindness. We present a complete pipeline to convert scanned Braille documents into classic printed text. The tool has been thought as support for assistants (e.g., in the education domain) and parents of blind and partially sig...

Nowadays video technology is basically digital, but in the last half century the most diffused devices have been analog magnetic tapes. Since this is an old storing technique, it is necessary to convert these data in digital form. Moreover, analog videos may be affected by particular defects, called drops. Despite there are many hardware to perform...

The concept of fabric, defined by the description and classification method introduced by Whitbread (1995), has been usually used to perform petrographic studies of thin sections of ancient ceramics. This work analyzes pottery of archaeological interest by making use of image processing algorithms. First a preliminary petrographic analysis has been...

The objective and repeatable measurement of the color of artifacts is a much needed practice in archeological research. Indeed, in many cases, color information are crucial for the interpretation of cultural products. To avoid the risks of a too subjective autoptic recognition, Munsell system is commonly adopted. This method requires that a human o...