Papers by vincenzo angelino
This thesis addresses informational formulation of image processing problems. This formulation ex... more This thesis addresses informational formulation of image processing problems. This formulation expresses the solution through a minimization of an information-based energy. These energies belong to the nonparametric class in that they do not make any parametric assumption on the underlying data distribution. Energies are expressed directly as a function of the data considered as random variables. However, classical nonparametric estimation relies on fixed-size kernels which becomes less reliable when dealing with high dimensional data. Actually, recent trends in image processing rely on patch-based approaches which deal with vectors describing local patterns of natural images, e. g., local pixel neighbor- hoods. The k-Nearest Neighbors framework solves these difficulties by locally adapting the data distribution in such high dimensional spaces. Based on these premises, we develop new algorithms tackling mainly two problems of image processing: deconvolution and denoising. The proble...
2021 26th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA )
This paper describes a framework to develop cost-benefit analyses of the use of predictive mainte... more This paper describes a framework to develop cost-benefit analyses of the use of predictive maintenance technologies, i.e., sensors and network infrastructure, in order to optimise field maintenance activities in situations where there is a need for maintenance personnel to move across a wide geographical area. The proposed methodologies can be used both in the strategic phase, in which it is necessary to make the choice of the maintenance strategy, and in the operational phase, in which, through decision support systems, it is necessary to plan maintenance interventions in the current maintenance cycle. In order to illustrate the proposed methodologies, a toy problem is defined and developed via Monte Carlo simulations. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2018
This paper deals with ground displacement measurements with Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar... more This paper deals with ground displacement measurements with Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferometry (DInSAR) technique. These ground modifications often occur as a consequence of an earthquake. The island of Ischia (Southern Italy) has been chosen as case study since it was hit by a severe earthquake on the 21st of August 2017. The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and the Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) provided the displacement maps considering interferometric pairs close to the main shock event. In this work, a further interferometric pair, which also includes some aftershocks, has been used to calculate ground modifications. The results confirmed a ground subsidence up to 4 centimeters in the epicenter area, in agreement with the reference data. This study rely on open access data as well as on open software, both provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) under the Copernicus program. In particular, data from Sentinel-1 radar satellite mission and SNAP software have been used. The availability of such data and software is relevant for public institutions that can produce valuable information at almost no charge.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific ... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-entific research documents, whether they are pub-lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et a ̀ la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
<p>Illegal landfills are unfortunately a plague in some areas of Southern I... more <p>Illegal landfills are unfortunately a plague in some areas of Southern Italy and cause significant direct and indirect environmental issues, including contamination of aquifers and dioxin release in the atmosphere due to arson attacks, potentially dangerous for local populations. The Italian government, at both central and local scale, is by long time enforcing these crimes, but the surveillance of wide areas is difficult with traditional on-site methodologies, even because it is possible that landfills are located within private properties not accessible without formal authorization. Therefore, remote sensing technologies are a key to improve and make more efficient the and frequent the monitoring activities.</p><p>Crowd for the Environment (C4E) is a project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, aiming at the development of an innovative framework for the identification of illegal landfills using satellite and drone remote sensing in order to support decision makers in the organization of subsequent on-site actions. To this end, a new algorithm to detect possible polluted sites or sources of pollution has been developed. Specifically, the work has been focused on two particularly challenging and inter-related targets like micro-landfills and greenhouses.</p><p>Micro-landfills are often the result of waste disposal processes from industrial or agricultural activities partially or totally clandestine. The corresponding unregistered industrial or agricultural plants are potential sources of pollution. The comparison of satellite detections with the database of legal activities allowed to determine whether or not a plant is registered and therefore potentially harmful. In the study area, located in the nearby of the city of Caserta, greenhouses are a typical example of unregistered agricultural infrastructures which could illegally dispose micro-dumps of their plastic cover after the use.</p><p>Among the tested algorithms, those working on the spatial characterization of targets based on Scattering Transform were of particular interest. Such algorithms were used to extract textural features from images and their effectiveness was tested in comparison and in conjunction with spectral features within multi-class classifiers. The results obtained on very-high resolution Pleiades images with 50 cm spatial resolution showed that these features can significantly improve the detectors of both the identified targets.  In the case of greenhouses, which are targets without significant spectral characteristics, due to their transparency and reflectivity, the features based on Scattering Transform, alone, allow to build very competitive detectors. In the case of micro-dumps, which are targets very difficult to detect from satellite, both for their size and for the heterogeneous spectral characteristics, the use of the Scattering Transform seems the most effective tool, while the combined use of spectral features does not provide particular added value.</p><p>Ultimately, the use of the Scattering Transform seems to find an interesting application in the detection of environmental criticalities, also in relation to targets which are particularly difficult to be detected due to their high spectral ambiguity.</p>
Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing/GIS Applications IX, 2018
This paper presents a case study about the detection of illegal dumps from optical satellite imag... more This paper presents a case study about the detection of illegal dumps from optical satellite images in a large territory falling in the provinces of Naples and Caserta, Southern Italy. This location is also known with the term "Terra dei Fouchi" because in this area is particularly widespread the phenomenon of waste burning and, over the past decades, there have been many landfills of hazardous waste of industrial origin. In order to contrast this phenomenon, the government of the Campania Region organized some prevention, monitoring and repression activities. In particular, the monitoring activities are employed by periodic inspection of sites, which are often object of illegal deposits (former quarries, illegal dumps, as well as city and country roads). The periodic inspection is usually performed by patrols of the company SMA Campania (the in-house regional company, specialized in environmental protection), and law enforcement agencies. Since early warning of illegal and the quick characterization of the detected sites is a key factor for effective resource allocation in the fight against illegal waste dumping, as part of a project, the periodic monitoring inspections of the local environmental agency have been supported with multi-temporal satellite images. The detection has been performed via expert photo-interpretation in order to achieve a high level of accuracy and reliable maps. However, in order to reduce this time consuming task, a multi-features detection algorithm has been implemented. Detected sites have been then classified according to 4 major characteristics (type, state, location and activity) of the dumps. Moreover, a multi-temporal analysis has been performed and it allowed following the evolution of the phenomenon. This approach was effective in both finding new illegal spills (with associated macro classification) and to follow the evolution (in terms of extension and persistence) of landfills already found in the past.
IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2018
This paper presents an approach to process open access medium and high resolution multispectral i... more This paper presents an approach to process open access medium and high resolution multispectral images for both active fire monitoring and post-fire damage assessment. The performance of a recently introduced spectral index for active fire detection (AFD3) is assessed and a processing workflows for burning area estimation is applied to a reference case study, using only data provided by the NASA Landsat-8 and ESA Sentinel-2 missions. The reported results shows satisfactory performance, that can be further improved integrating such products in exiting services based on other missions like MODIS and VIIRS.
2018 IEEE International Conference on Environmental Engineering (EE), 2018
In this paper a set of spectral indices, some of them novel, is suggested in order to effectively... more In this paper a set of spectral indices, some of them novel, is suggested in order to effectively process multispec-tral images, from the NASA and ESA missions Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2, for fire monitoring. The processing aims at extract common products, useful to detect active fires and evaluate the position and extension of the burned areas. The use of open data in comparison with other paid solutions is to remark because of great interest to public and private end users. The thresholding of the proposed indices produces satisfactory results in terms of classification accuracy. Moreover, the joint use of images from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2, by increasing the overall availability of data, allows also to overcome some limitations on time delivery and high frequency observation, requirements that instead are goodly matched through the use of lower resolution multispectral images such as those from MODIS and VIIRS satellites. The proposed indices have been successfully tested on Vesu...
2016 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2016
A flood is a relatively high flow of water that overtops the natural and artificial banks in any ... more A flood is a relatively high flow of water that overtops the natural and artificial banks in any of the reaches of a stream. When banks are overtopped, water spreads over flood plain and generally causes problem for inhabitants, crops and vegetation. During extreme flood events, it is important to determine quickly the extent of flooding and land use under water. Flood maps can be applied to develop comprehensive relief effort immediately after flooding. There are varieties of issues and uncertainties involved in flood mapping. Remotely sensed data can be used to develop flood map in an efficient and effective way. In this paper different techniques of flood mapping using active and passive remote sensing systems are applied, so that a final flood inundation map has been prepared by combining all data within a Geographical Information System (GIS) environment. The flood inundation maps can be further used for quick identification of areas of potential flood hazard to minimize the fl...
"This paper presents a new usupervised workflow to assess the extension of the burning damag... more "This paper presents a new usupervised workflow to assess the extension of the burning damages due to wild fire events. The workflow make use of open access medium and high resolution multispectral images from the Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellites, together with open access low resolution products provided by the MODIS and the VIIRS missions.In particular, the proposed workflow considers strong variations in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) between two observation dates in order to detect burning damages. The changes in NDVI not related to the wildfire effects are filtered thanks to the MODIS and VIIRS hotspot detections occurred during the same observation period. To this aim, an Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) approach is employed. In fact, the proposed false positive filtering method is based on object features such as {\it 'overlaps with'} and {\it 'distance to'} detected hotspots. Experimental results on the Vesuvius, Southern Italy, wildfires of July 2017, show the effectiveness of the proposed method."
2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS, 2021
The identification of contaminated sites is a key application in remote sensing. Major challenges... more The identification of contaminated sites is a key application in remote sensing. Major challenges are typically related to the difficulties in the spectral characterization of the targets. The detection performance can be improved by exploiting a suitable spatial description of the scene. In this work, the use of spatial features based on the Scattering Transform for detection of micro-dumps and greenhouses is proposed. These features are jointly exploited with spectral ones to improve the classification accuracy within a multi -class classifier. The obtained results show the relevance of spatial features in the detection of the targets of interest.
2021 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium IGARSS, 2021
In case of emergency, a rapid first picture of the damaged area is required in order to have a be... more In case of emergency, a rapid first picture of the damaged area is required in order to have a better comprehension of the event and to deploy first aids. The continuous monitoring of the area affected by a disaster can also help to follow its evolution and to evaluate the consequences on population and man-made structures. The continuous monitoring is usually defined as persistence. In this paper, the deployment of HAPS (High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite) is proposed to monitor an emergency area right during the phase of disaster response, offering images in proximity and time persistence. Indeed, thanks to their proximity to the Earth surface (18–20 km of altitude) HAPS could provide images with greater spatial resolution than satellites and greater time resolution because of station-keeping or loiter capability on the desired area. Feasibility and effectiveness of this proposal is assessed by a simulation of a hypothetic HAPS usage in the realistic condition represented by the Central Italy earthquake in 2016.
IGARSS 2020 - 2020 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2020
This paper presents an unsupervised workflow to assess the extension of the burned areas due to w... more This paper presents an unsupervised workflow to assess the extension of the burned areas due to wildfire events over green vegetated areas, in particular woods and forests, based on open access and high spatial resolution multispectral images from the Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellites, together with open access high temporal resolution products (MODIS and VIIRS). The idea is to use jointly these kinds of data to combine the advantages linked to the use of high spatial resolution data with those ones derived from the exploitation of high temporal resolution data. Experimental results, carried on different case studies, show the effectiveness of the proposed method on forest fires, by reaching a performance in terms of the F-measure parameter, that ranges from 0.69 to 0.95, depending on the specific case study.
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2019
Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing/GIS Applications VII, 2016
On October 15, 2015, a severe and devastating flood hit the region of Sannio, Southern Italy, and... more On October 15, 2015, a severe and devastating flood hit the region of Sannio, Southern Italy, and the city of Benevento. Benevento and the hilly area of Sannio, have already experienced similar disasters, but the natural disasters occurred in the past did not help to better cope with current ones. The flood in this almost unknown area of Campania reached its climax with the flooding of the Tammaro and Calore rivers. The extent of the damage to the region, businesses and people was very heavy. Benevento is the most affected area. Utilizing a combination of remote-sensing techniques, Geographic Information System (GIS) data, this project employed Sentinel-1/2 and Landsat 8 imagery taken before and during the floods to calculate total inundated area and delineate flood extent. This data was then used to assess pre-existing flood hazard maps of the area. The resulting maps and methodologies from this project were delivered to the local governments and organizations as they work to better understand this historic event and plan for recovery throughout the region. The main goal of this study is to map flood inundation using principally open, free and full data acquired by Sentinel and Landsat satellite platforms operated by European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) respectively.
International Journal of Sustainable Development and Planning, 2016
Enforcement of environmental regulation is a persistent challenge and timely detection of the vio... more Enforcement of environmental regulation is a persistent challenge and timely detection of the violations is key to holding the violators accountable. The use of remote sensing data is becoming an effective practice in the fight against environmental crimes. In this work, a novel and effective approach for the detection of potentially hazardous cattle-breeding facilities, exploiting both synthetic aperture radar and optical multispectral data together with geospatial analyses in the geographic information system (GIS) environment, is proposed. Experiments on data available for the area of Caserta (Southern Italy), show that the proposed technique provides very high detection capability, up to 90%, with a acceptable false alarm rate, becoming a useful tool in the hand of agencies engaged in the protection of territory.
Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems, 2016
In the last years the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA) designed many versions of on-board... more In the last years the Italian Aerospace Research Center (CIRA) designed many versions of on-board payload management software for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), to be used in ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) missions. A typical required function in these software suites is detection and tracking of moving ground vehicles.
ISPRS Annals of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 2015
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often employed to collect high resolution images in order to ... more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often employed to collect high resolution images in order to perform image mosaicking and/or 3D reconstruction. Images are usually stored on board and then processed with on-ground desktop software. In such a way the computational load, and hence the power consumption, is moved on ground, leaving on board only the task of storing data. Such an approach is important in the case of small multi-rotorcraft UAVs because of their low endurance due to the short battery life. Images can be stored on board with either still image or video data compression. Still image system are preferred when low frame rates are involved, because video coding systems are based on motion estimation and compensation algorithms which fail when the motion vectors are significantly long and when the overlapping between subsequent frames is very small. In this scenario, UAVs attitude and position metadata from the Inertial Navigation System (INS) can be employed to estimate glo...
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often employed to capture high resolution images in order to ... more Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often employed to capture high resolution images in order to perform image mosaicking and/or 3D reconstruction. Images are usually stored on-board or sent to the ground using still image or video data compression. Still image encoders are preferred when low frame rates are involved, because video coding systems are based on motion estimation and compensation algorithms which fail when the motion vectors are significantly long. The latter is the case of low frame rate videos, in which the overlapping between subsequent frames is very small. In this scenario, UAVs attitude and position metadata from the Inertial Navigation System (INS) can be employed to estimate global motion parameters without video analysis. However, a low complexity analysis can refine the motion field estimated using only the metadata. In this work, we propose to use this refinement step in order to improve the position and attitude estimation produced by the navigation system with the aim of maximizing the encoder performance. Experiments on both simulated and real world video sequences confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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Papers by vincenzo angelino