Dario Allegra

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

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...

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...

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...

Colour specification can be carried out using different instruments or tools. The biggest limitation of these existing instruments consists of the region in which they can be applied. Indeed, they can only work locally in small regions on the surface of the object under examination. This implicates a slow process, errors while repeating the procedu...

The color perception is a fundamental characteristic of humans. We use this capacity for an infinite number of activities. Even so, it has a strong subjective component, and many others factors can impact it. The color spaces were created to give an objective color measurement itself, one of the most used in the field of color measurement is the CI...

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...

Color specification is an important challenge in many application domains including Cultural Heritage. The collection of metadata concerning Cultural Heritage involves the valorization, fruition and becomes part of the conservation process. It becomes essential to find methods that simplify and optimize the acquisition of such data as color informa...

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...

Food understanding from digital media has become a challenge with important applications in many different domains. On the other hand, food is a crucial part of human life since the health is strictly affected by diet. The impact of food in people life led Computer Vision specialists to develop new methods for automatic food intake monitoring and f...

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...

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...

provides a summary and overview of the 5th International Workshop on Multimedia Assisted Dietary Management.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...