Antonio Lagudi

Università della Calabria | Università della Calabria · Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering

The global economy heavily relies on maritime commerce, commonly known as the “Blue Economy,” which involves the transportation of raw materials and products via maritime traffic and the utilization of marine resources, including oil, gas, and underwater mines. The importance of various infrastructures linked to the sea, such as fish farms, pipelin...

The development of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) is driven by careful design choices in order to obtain the best trade-off between mission performance and cost. Currently, several companies provide off-the-shelf solutions for a wide variety of operational scenarios offering highly modular systems. This allows users to customize the AUV int...

The paper presents the development of a Virtual Reality (VR) application to perform dives in the Christoforos Shipwreck. The huge wreck lies in the Panormos Bay of Skopelos island (Greece) at a depth of 45 meters. Based on a well-known methodology designed for ancient shipwrecks, the 3D reconstruction of the underwater site has been carried out by...

The documentation, conservation, and preservation of underwater archaeological sites is conventionally performed by divers in shallow waters. However, when dealing with significant depths, the sites can be inaccessible for humans, presenting significant challenges and risks, making these activities hazardous. Recently, the use of robotic platform s...

The Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD, 2008/56/EC) was adopted to achieve a Good Environmental Status (GES) in the EU's marine waters and to protect resources and ecosystem services, including the deep-sea waters and seafloor. The deep sea (below 200 m) is the largest biome on Earth, and its biodiversity plays a key role, despite being stro...

Underwater cultural heritage (UCH) is a crucial asset for our knowledge of human history and traditions [...]

In June 2017 a multi-departmental research group of the University of Calabria conducted some investigations on a marble cargo at Cala Cicala, located at a depth of approximately 6 meters along the southern section of the promontory of Capo Colonna (Crotone). The cargo is composed of 36 marble elements of various sizes, mostly pillars and blocks, o...

As one of the most promising technologies for next-generation mobile platforms, Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to radically change the way users interact with real environments enriched with various digital information. To achieve this potential, it is of fundamental importance to track and maintain accurate registration between real and...

Underwater photogrammetry provides a means of generating high-resolution products such as dense point clouds, 3D models, and orthomosaics with centimetric scale resolutions. Underwater photogrammetric models can be used to monitor the growth and expansion of benthic communities, including the assessment of the conservation status of seagrass beds a...

In recent years, the development in digital technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) has evolved rapidly. These technologies are currently in the process of creating driving change in the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs), representing innovative means to share information, facilitating access and increasing the va...

Among the activities planned for the MUSAS Project, the digital reconstruction of the underwater sites constitutes a particular challenge, requiring strong cooperation between archaeologists and technicians. The case of the Villa dei Pisoni in Baiae, one of the richest in the Phlaegrean territory, is particularly interesting: the architectural rema...

The Mediterranean Sea has a vast maritime heritage which exploitation is made difficult because of the many limitations imposed by the submerged environment. Archaeological diving tours, in fact, suffer from the impossibility to provide underwater an exhaustive explanation of the submerged remains. Furthermore, low visibility conditions, due to wat...

In this study, we present a framework for seagrass habitat mapping in shallow (5–50 m) and very shallow water (0–5 m) by combining acoustic, optical data and Object-based Image classification. The combination of satellite multispectral images-acquired from 2017 to 2019, together with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photomosaic maps, high-resolution m...

Documentation and conservation of underwater cultural heritage (UCH) are crucial to preserving humankind’s history and traditions, safeguarding tangible testimonies of past human life while ensuring its accessibility to future generations. The TECTONIC (Technological Consortium TO develop sustainability of underwater Cultural Heritage) project is p...

The Mediterranean Sea has a vast maritime heritage which exploitation is made difficult because of the many limitations imposed by the submerged environment. Archaeological diving tours, in fact, suffer from the impossibility to provide underwater an exhaustive explanation of the submerged remains. Furthermore, low visibility conditions, due to wat...

3D models of submerged structures and underwater archaeological finds are widely used in various and different applications, such as monitoring, analysis, dissemination, and inspection. Underwater environments are characterised by poor visibility conditions and the presence of marine flora and fauna. Consequently, the adoption of passive optical te...

The paper presents the MOLUX project which aims to design and develop a system capable of supporting the underwater operators by means of innovative technologies for the diagnosis, recovery, management, conservation, and valorization of the archaeological and naturalistic assets in the marine environment. This system allows to increase the efficien...

The paper presents the digital technologies developed in the VISAS project and their application to the underwater archaeological site of Cala Minnola (Levanzo Island, Italy)that preserves the remains of a Roman ship. Following the basic principles defined by UNESCO for the protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage the VISAS project has led to...

The preservation status of an underwater cultural site can be determined as the combination of two primary factors, namely the site physical integrity, which results from the past and present interaction of the site itself with the biological/chemical agents located in the surrounding environment, and the exposure of the site to human-related threa...

The paper presents the application of some Virtual Reality technologies developed in the Horizon 2020 i-MARECulture project to the case study of the sunken “Villa con ingresso a protiro”, dated around the II century AD, and located in the Marine Protected Area - Underwater Park of Baiae (Naples). The i-MARECulture project (www.imareculture.eu), in...

Aboveground biomass (AGB) is a parameter commonly used for assessing and monitoring primary productivity of grassland communities. Destructive AGB measurements, although accurate, are time‐consuming and do not allow for repeated measurements as required by monitoring protocols. Structure‐from‐motion (SfM) photogrammetry has been proved to be a reli...

La Posidonia oceanica (L.) Delile rappresenta un habitat prioritario ai sensi della direttiva Europea 92/43/EEC ed è una specie caratterizzante che forma praterie molto estese, colonizzando aree costiere e non, sabbiose e rocciose da 1 metro a circa 45 metri di profondità [Abadie et al., 2018]. La specie è inserita nell’allegato II del Protocollo S...

Underwater manipulation is a key technology for marine industries and exploration that can be efficiently adopted in other application fields, such as underwater archaeology, biological manipulation, scientific expedition, as well as offshore construction in the Oil and Gas industry. It is performed remotely by expert pilots thanks to the visual fe...

The paper presents a virtual diving system based on a virtual reality (VR) application for the exploitation of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. The virtual diving experience has been designed to entertain users, but its added pedagogical value is explicitly emphasized too. In fact, the ludic activities, consisting in the simulation of a real divin...

The Underwater Cultural Heritage represents a key aspect of our historical memory still little known due to a number of limitations imposed by the underwater environment. The aim of this paper is to explore the use of digital three-dimensional reconstructions to support the research about this immeasurable archaeological and historical resource. Th...

The Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) represents a vast historical and scientific resource that, often, is not accessible to the general public due the environment and depth where it is located. Digital technologies (Virtual Museums, Virtual Guides and Virtual Reconstruction of Cultural Heritage) provide a unique opportunity for digital accessibil...

The paper presents the application of the technologies and methods defined in the VISAS project for the case study of the underwater archaeological site of Cala Minnola located in the island of Levanzo, in the archipelago of the Aegadian Islands (Sicily, Italy). The VISAS project (http://visas-project.eu) aims to improve the responsible and sustain...

The underwater cultural heritage is an immeasurable archaeological and historical resource with huge, but yet largely unexploited, potentials for the maritime and coastal tourism.

On November 2, 2001, the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage provided a detailed state cooperation system and set out the basic principles for the protection of underwater cultural heritage. To date, the Convention has been ratified by 51 countries. One of the four main principles states that the In situ preserva...

VISAS (Virtual and Augmented Exploitation of Submerged Archaeological Sites) is a collaborative research project created to improve the responsible and sustainable exploitation of underwater archaeological sites. This strategic goal is reached through the development of three services. The first concerns the 3-D reconstruction of the underwater env...

The integration of underwater 3D data captured by acoustic and optical systems is a promising technique in various applications such as mapping or vehicle navigation. It allows for compensating the drawbacks of the low resolution of acoustic sensors and the limitations of optical sensors in bad visibility conditions. Aligning these data is a challe...

The Marine Protected Area Capo Rizzuto has invested significantly in research and innovation in order to improve the process of monitoring, control and protection of Posidonia oceanica meadows. In fact, within the Svi.Stri.In project ”Development of Innovative Instruments”, funded by the Italian Ministry for the Environment Land and Sea, a prototyp...

Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) play an important role in a number of operations conducted in shallow and deep water (e.g.: exploration, survey, intervention, etc.), in several application fields like marine science, offshore construction, and underwater archeology. In this work we describe the preliminary steps in the development of t...

This paper presents some experimentations, which have been conducted in the submerged archeological Park of Baiae, aimed to identify the problems related to the underwater 3D documentation process. The first test has been addressed to verify if a dense stereo mapping technique, usually employed in terrestrial and aerial applications, might be emplo...

Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) play an important role in a number of operations conducted in shallow and deep water (e.g.: exploration, survey, intervention, etc.), in several application fields like marine science, offshore construction, and underwater archeology. ROVs are usually equipped with different imaging devices, both optical...

Seagrass communities are considered one of the most productive and complex marine ecosystems. Seagrasses belong to a small group of 66 species that can form extensive meadows in all coastal areas of our planet. Posidonia oceanica beds are the most characteristic ecosystem of the Mediterranean Sea, and should be constantly monitored, preserved and m...