Silvio Barra

University of Naples Federico II | UNINA · Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology

Urban environments are demanding effective and efficient detection in 3D of objects using monocular cameras, e.g., for intelligent monitoring or decision support. The limited availability of large-scale roadside camera datasets and the mere focus of existing 3D object detection methods on autonomous driving scenarios pose significant challenges for...

Ultrasound is a readily available, non-invasive and low-cost screening for the identification of endometriosis lesions, but its diagnostic specificity strongly depends on the experience of the operator. For this reason, computer-aided diagnosis tools based on Artificial Intelligence techniques can provide significant help to the clinical staff, bot...

In recent years, the concept of smart cities has garnered increasing attention as urban areas grapple with the challenges of population growth, resource management, and infrastructure optimization [...]

Detecting 3D objects in images from urban monocular cameras is essential to enable intelligent monitoring applications for local municipalities decision-support systems. However, existing detection methods in this domain are mainly focused on autonomous driving and limited to frontal views from sensors mounted on the vehicle. In contrast, to monito...

Ultrasound is a readily available, non-invasive and low cost screening for the identification of endometriosis lesions, but its diagnostic specificity strongly depends on the experience of the operator. For this reason, computer-aided diagnosis tools based on Artificial Intelligence techniques can provide significant help to the clinical staff, bot...

The last few decades have witnessed the increasing deployment of digital technologies in the urban environment with the goal of creating improved services to citizens especially related to their safety. This motivation, enabled by the widespread evolution of cutting edge technologies within the Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and Compu...

In this work, we combine Curriculum Learning with Deep Reinforcement Learning to learn without any prior domain knowledge, an end-to-end competitive driving policy for the CARLA autonomous driving simulator. To our knowledge, we are the first to provide consistent results of our driving policy on all towns available in CARLA. Our approach divides t...

Emotions recognition is widely applied for many tasks in different fields, from human-computer and human-robot interaction to learning platforms. Also, it can be used as an intrinsic approach for face recognition tasks, in which an expression-independent face classifier is developed. Most approaches face the problem by designing deeper and deeper n...

Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer among the female world population. Its early detection has a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of treatments, as well as reducing serious complications and deaths. Ultrasound imaging represents a standard diagnostic technique for this purpose, due to its low invasiveness and cost. However...

Object detection has been widely used in intelligent video surveillance, robot navigation, industrial detection, and other fields. Object detection can effectively reduce the consumption of human capital and has important practical significance. However, the existing object detection methods lack adaptability to the application environment and need...

In the last years, scientific and industrial research has experienced a growing interest in acquiring large annotated data sets to train artificial intelligence algorithms for tackling problems in different domains. In this context, we have observed that even the market for football data has substantially grown. The analysis of football matches rel...

Breast cancer is the most prevalent type of cancer among the female world population. Its early detection has a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of treatments, as well as reducing serious complications and deaths. Ultrasound imaging represents a standard diagnostic technique for this purpose, due to its low invasiveness and cost. However...

Nowadays, Smart Cities applications are becoming steadily popular, thanks to their main objective of improving people daily habits. The services provided by the aforementioned applications may be either addressed to the entire digital population or narrowed towards a specific kind of audience, like drivers and pedestrians. In this sense, the propos...

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an extremely stimulating and challenging research area where Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processig (NLP) have recently met. In image captioning and video summarization, the semantic information is completely contained in still images or video dynamics, and it has only to be mined and expressed in a h...

Human-Computer Interfaces have always played a fundamental role in usability and commands’ interpretability of the modern software systems. With the explosion of the Artificial Intelligence concept, such interfaces have begun to fill the gap between the user and the system itself, further evolving in Adaptive User Interfaces (AUI). Meta Interfaces...

In the last years, scientific and industrial research has experienced a growing interest in acquiring large annotated data sets to train artificial intelligence algorithms for tackling problems in different domains. In this context, we have observed that even the market for football data has substantially grown. The analysis of football matches rel...

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an extremely stimulating and challenging research area where Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processig (NLP) have recently met. In image captioning and video summarization, the semantic information is completely contained in still images or video dynamics, and it has only to be mined and expressed in a h...

Since their appearance, Smart Cities have aimed at improving the daily life of people, helping to make public services smarter and more efficient. Several of these services are often intended to provide better security conditions for citizens and drivers. In this vein, we present Heimdall, an AI-based video surveillance system for traffic monitorin...

Human-Computer Interfaces have always played a fundamental role in usability and commands' interpretability of the modern software systems. With the explosion of the Artificial Intelligence concept, such interfaces have begun to fill the gap between the user and the system itself, further evolving in Adaptive User Interfaces (AUI). Meta Interfaces...

Since their appearance, Smart Cities have aimed at improving the daily life of people, helping to make public services smarter and more efficient. Several of these services are often intended to provide better security conditions for citizens and drivers. In this vein, we present HEIMDALL, an AI-based video surveillance system for traffic monitorin...

Anastylosis is an archaeological term consisting in a reconstruction technique whereby an artefact is restored using the original architectural elements. Experts can sometimes imply months or years to carry out this task counting on their expertise. Software procedures can represent a valid support but several challenges arise when dealing with pra...

Manual event tagging may be a very long and stressful activity, due the monotonous operations involved. This is particularly true when dealing with online video tagging, as for football matches, in which the burden of events to tag can consist of many thousands of actions, according to the desired level of granularity. In this work we describe an a...

Anastylosis is an archaeological technique which focuses on the reconstruction of collapsed building and destroyed artworks, starting from the original pieces. Many digital approaches have been developed in the last decade, mainly based on 2D and 3D analysis of the structure of the fragments. These techniques aim at supporting the priceless work of...

In the last decade, market financial forecasting has attracted high interests amongst the researchers in pattern recognition. Usually, the data used for analysing the market, and then gamble on its future trend, are provided as time series; this aspect , along with the high fluctuation of this kind of data, cuts out the use of very efficient classi...

Despite the success obtained in face detection and recognition over the last ten years of research, the analysis of facial attributes still represents a trend topic. Keeping the full face recognition aside, exploring the potentials of soft biometric traits, i.e. singular facial traits like the nose, the mouth, the hair and so on, is yet considered...

Hadoop is a software framework allowing for the possibility of coding distributed applications starting from a MapReduce algorithm with very low programming efforts. However, the performance of the implementations resulting from such a straightforward approach are often disappointing. This may happen because a vanilla implementation of a MapReduce...

Technology is expected to enhance life in a Smart City: everything is intelligent, digital, interconnected, and inclusive. In addition, all everyday activities are facilitated. This paper presents a biometric authentication strategy based on gait dynamics. The produced signals are acquired by the common mobile device accelerometers (especially thos...

This paper presents a novel technique to build an access key that finds its natural fit in blockchain, smart cities environments, transactions of electronic currencies and, as proved by NIST tests, in high computer security scenarios where having a high level of secrecy is mandatory; furthermore, the key building procedure employs a biometric compo...

Notwithstanding the enhancement obtained in the last decade researches, the recognition of facial attributes is still today a trend. Besides the mere face recognition, the singular face features, like mouth, nose and hair, are considered as soft biometrics; these can be useful for human identification in cases the face is partially occluded, and on...

People struggle every day with authentication to access a protected service or location, or simply aimed at protecting one’s own devices. This spurs a growing demand for self-handled authentication strategies. The increasing number of remote services of various kinds corresponds to an increasing number of passwords to use and remember, and also to...

We are living an era in which each of us is immersed in a fully connected environment. The smart devices worn everyday by everyone let the users be projected into the so called IoT world, whose main aim is to provide tools and strategies to solve problems of everyday life as well as to improve well-being and quality of life. Such a goal can be achi...

Once confined to indoor biometric applications depending on dedicated acquisition devices, recently the iris has proved to be a suitable biometric for in-the-wild ubiquitous person authentication, thanks to continuously improving image capturing/processing performances provided by last generations of smartphones. In this mobile context, the efficie...

User interface usability is a very relevant aspect, especially for mobile applications. In this paper we propose a methodology for automating user interface usability testing in the early phases of the development process directly on the mobile device. Mockup interfaces are designed, then the way the designer interacts with the interface is compare...

One of the problems for archaeologic museums is having the opportunity to show most of the objects that they preserve. This is an action they can’t afford because of the limitation of exhibition spaces, the high number of artifacts they guard and/or the conditions of the real objects. Nowadays, with the use of cutting-edge 3D technologies, there is...

Is biometrics as a service the next giant leap, as Jeremy Rose asks? New trends in consumer applications seem to testify this revolution. However, it is worth wondering to what extent both company infrastructures and the market are actually ready for this. This article explores the potential of cloud-based biometrics (biometrics as a service) for s...

Nowadays, biometric recognition and verification methods are everywhere, trying to face the security issues that constantly affect our digital-every day life. In addition, many special-purpose applications, also need a constant (continuous) verification of the user in order to avoid that a sensitive operation is executed by an impostor; as an examp...

The guest editors of the IEEE Cloud Computing special issue on Biometrics-as-a-Service discuss the benefits and challenges of using cloud computing with biometric authentication systems as well as the articles included in this issue. Three potential research topics are also discussed, including the use of machine/deep-learning techniques to circumv...

The analysis of the shape and geometry of the human hand has long represented an attractive field of research to address the needs of digital image forensics. Over recent years, it has also turned out to be effective in biometrics, where several innovative research lines are pursued. Given the widespread diffusion of mobile and portable devices, th...

Most of the application involving the study of EEG (Electroencephalogram) and ECG (Electrocardiogram) are focused on their usefulness from a medical point of view. In the last decade, these signals have been extensively studied also from other perspectives, like biometric recognition, sleep disorder analysis and brain computer interface application...

The iris segmentation step is usually the most time consuming stage of biometric systems when dealing with non ideal conditions, which produce diverse noise factors during the acquisition. On the other side, it also represents a crucial step since poor removal of noise leads to degradation of recognition performance. In this work, a lightweight fuz...

In the present paper, we propose a source camera identification method for mobile devices based on deep learning. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown a remarkable performance on several tasks such as image recognition, video analysis or natural language processing. A CNN consists on a set of layers where each layer is composed...

This paper presents a novel approach to hand-based biometrics that uses mobile devices. Hand-based recognition has been explored via different research lines and taking into consideration different traits. On the other hand, few studies tackle its feasibility on mobile devices. Given their diffusion and availability, their use in this context appea...

Physiological measures are widely studied from a medical point of view. Most applications lie in the field of diagnosis of heart attacks, as regards the ECG, or the detection of epileptic events, in the case of the EEG. In the last ten years, these signals are being investigated also from a biometric point of view, in order to exploit the discrimin...

The increasing popularity of smartphones amongst the population laid the basis for a wide range of applications aimed at security and privacy protection. Very modern mobile devices have recently demonstrated the feasibility of using a camera sensor to access the system without typing any alphanumerical password. In this work, we present a method th...

Nowadays, many smartphones are provided with built-in sensors for the acquisition and the recognition of specific biometric traits of the user. This policy has been adopted since the massive use of such devices brought the user to store sensible data in them as well as effectuate sensitive transactions on-the-move. As a consequence, many biometric...

Interest in the security of individuals has increased in recent years. This increase has in turn led to much wider deployment of surveillance cameras worldwide, and consequently, automated surveillance systems research has received more attention from the scientific community than before. Concurrently, biometrics research has become more popular as...

Soft biometrics have been emerging to complement other traits and are particularly useful for poor quality data. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to estimate human head poses and to infer soft biometric labels based on the 3D morphology of the human head. Starting by considering a set of pose hypotheses, we use a learning set of hea...

Facial recognition at-a-distance in surveillance scenarios remains an open problem, particularly due to the small number of pixels representing the facial region. The use of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras has been advocated to solve this problem, however, the existing approaches either rely on rough approximations or additional constraints to estimate...

Efforts in biometrics are being held into extending robust recognition techniques to in the wild scenarios. Nonetheless, and despite being a very attractive goal, human identification in the surveillance context remains an open problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel biometric system – Quis-Campi – that effectively bridges the gap between surv...

The recognition of individuals based on behavioral and biological characteristics have made important strides over the past few years. Growing interest has been recently devoted to the study of physiological measures, which include the electrical activity of brain (EEG) and heart (ECG). Even if the use of multimodal approaches overcome several limi...

The growing concerns about persons security and the increasing popularity of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras, have been raising the interest on automated master-slave surveillance systems. Such systems are typically composed by (1) a fixed wide-angle camera that covers a large area, detects and tracks moving objects in the scene; and (2) a PTZ camera,...

Many research studies demonstrated that recognition based on ear biometrics offers an accuracy which is comparable to face trait, especially in controlled settings. Our proposal is to exploit it to avoid the problem of newborn swap, which is possible and actually happens, most of all in crowded maternity wards of big hospitals. We tested the viabil...

Multi-biometric systems are a powerful solution to deal with limitations of single classi¯ers, therefore improving the ¯nal recognition accuracy. The sub-systems composing the ¯nal architecture often return supplementary indices of input quality and/or of response reliability, which further qualify each recognition score. These indices can enter di...

Tracking of human beings represents a hot research topic in the field of video analysis. It is attracting an increasing attention among researchers thanks to its possible application in many challenging tasks. Among these, action recognition, human/human and human/computer interaction require body-part tracking. Most of the existing techniques in l...

Ear biometrics, compared with other physical traits, presents both advantages and limits. First of all, the small surface and the quite simple structure play a controversial role. On the positive side, they allow faster processing than, say, face recognition, as well as less complex recognition strategies than, say, fingerprints. On the negative si...

In this chapter, the authors present some issues related to automatic face image tagging techniques. Their main purpose in user applications is to support the organization (indexing) and retrieval (or easy browsing) of images or videos in large collections. Their core modules include algorithms and strategies for handling very large face databases,...

The use of mobile devices is continuously growing, together with their ability to store and exchange sensitive data. This has spurred the interest, from one side, in exploiting their apparent vulnerabilities, and on the other side, in protecting users from any malfeasance. In this scenario, it has become essential to develop and deploy secure acces...