PROJECTS

EU projects

TRACENET - Training Centre Network on 3D and VR - aims to develop geospatial technologies, VR solutions and innovations for prevention, preparedness and response of Civil Protections and emergency responders to support policy and decision-making, encourage scientific excellence and exchange state-of-the-art knowledge and expertise. Within TRACENET, planners, decision makers, experts, teams and civil protection modules will jointly operate, test and learn from each other interacting within an online and real-time 3D environment. Such an innovative framework will offer simulation scenarios and countless opportunities to build expertise, share knowledge and establish remote but real contacts among participants, reducing costs and the environmental impact of training activities. TRACENET is funded under the EU Programme Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) and coordinated by the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy).

5Dculture - Deploying and Demonstrating a 3D cultural heritage space - enriches the offer of European 3D digital cultural heritage assets in the data space and fosters their reuse in important domains such as education, tourism and the wider cultural and creative sectors towards socially and economically sustainable outcomes. 5Dculture facilitates the management, enrichment and reuse of 3D heritage content by collecting, adjusting and deploying a series of digital technologies and tools (such as AI and semantic technologies) and by creating and promoting capacity building materials and activities to equipe cultural heritage institutions with the necessary knowledge and skills for a wider reuse of their 3D cultural assets. 3D content collections related to fashion, archaeology and architecture will be tackled. 5Dculture is co-funded under the EU call DIGITAL-2022-CULTURAL-02-HERITAGE.

FEROX - Fostering and Enabling AI, Data and Robotics Technologies for Supporting Human Workers in Harvesting Wild Food - will employ autonomous drones equipped with various sensors to acquire data, build 3D models of the forests and, therefore, accurately estimate berries’ locations, amount and types. The collected data will be used to build AI models to help pickers locate the berries and optimize their operations in the field. In addition, FEROX will provide wild berry pickers with navigation and locating services and physical support to improve their working conditions and boost their trust and confidence. FEROX's solution will contribute to the overall safety of the workers by automatically monitoring the pickers and providing aid where it is needed. FEROX is in collaboration with the TeV research group of FBK and it is funded under the EU call HORIZON-CL4-2021-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01.

InCUBE - an INClUsive toolBox for accElerating and smartening deep renovation - envisions to unlock the EU renovation wave through cutting-edge standardized and integrated processes based on (i) industrialization, (ii) new technologies for renewable energy production and storage, (iii) digitization (including Digital Twins, BIM, etc.) and (iv) new market entrants, organized under novel business. The Santa Chiara Open Lab and Santa Chiara Cultural Services Center in Trento’s historic district will represent one of 3 demonstration sites. The project is in collaboration with the DSIP research group and Sustainable Energy centre of FBK. InCUBE is funded under the EU call HORIZON-CL5-2021-D4-01-02, Grant Agreement no. 101069610 and is coordinated by CERTH.

SEC4TD - Securing tailings dam infrastructure with an innovative monitoring system - proposes an integrated end-to-end solution composed of hardware (IoT, drones, etc.) and software innovative products for mining operators and service providers that will enable multi-scale multi-platform data collection and visualization, events prediction, effective information management and data traceability. The SEC4TD will provide benefits to mining sector by improving the safety, efficacy and environment impact of the current mining processes and will also protect the reputation of this sector as well as will facilitate the compliance with new stricter regulations. SEC4TD will leverage on advanced and emerging technologies such as IoT low-power devices, mathematical soil model mechanisms, drones, advanced visualization tools, data analytics techniques, among others. The project is funded by the EIT Raw Materials and in collaboration with the DSIP research group of FBK.

USAGE - Urban Data Space for Green Deal - aims to provide solutions and mechanisms for making city-level environmental and climate data available ad usable by everyone. USAGE will support the implementation of various European Green Deal priority actions at the level where climate change is mostly felt: cities and towns. USAGE will provide AI-based tools, geo-data analytics and innovative governance mechanisms to share, access and use city-level data from Earth Observation (EO), Internet of Things (IoT), authoritative and crowd sources, leveraging on standards for data and service interoperability. USAGE will validate its solutions in four diverse pilot areas located in four different countries, focusing also on the reusability of the solutions in other urban areas. USAGE is funded under the EU call HORIZON-CL6-2021-GOVERNANCE-01-17, Grant Agreement no. 101059950 and is coordinated by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM).

WildDrone – Autonomous Drones for Nature Conservation Missions - is an international training network funded by the EU Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions. WildDrone aims to revolutionize wildlife conservation practices by using autonomous drone technology as a unifying platform to monitor wildlife populations, track their movements, and manage human-wildlife conflicts. We believe that the rapid decline of wildlife populations has prompted an urgent need for more effective and feasible nature conservation practices. The project will operate from 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2026.  

V0T3D - Ventilation Optimizing Technology based on 3D-scanning -  wants to robotize the Raw Material sector by introducing modern methods for the optimization of underground ventilation with the main aim of reducing electricity consumption by 1,5%. The VOT3D project, funded by the EIT Raw Materials, will deliver an innovative solution based on 3D digitization of underground tunnels and the creation of their real digital twins. These detailed and precise 3D data will allow to improve airflow simulations in order to adjust the most favorable ventilation scenario for the digitized underground tunnels.

Industrial projects

MIAMI

MIAMI is an industrial project which aims to develop a system able to integrate advanced metrology and artificial intelligence (AI) for: (i) helping an operator in setting up a laser micro-machining process and in checking the quality of the obtained result using 3D analytics; (ii) improving the production process by learning defects and their relation with machining parameters; (iii) developing new business opportunities related to design and sale of intelligent laser machines and related services. Two types of micro-machining are considered: LIPPS and micro-channels on steel. 3D data are collected with SEM and interferometers. MIAMI is in collaboration with Kirana and supported by the Autonomous Province of Trento.

UPDATE

UPDATE – fast aUtomatic insPection with 3D imAging and arTificial intElligence - is a metrology project, run in collaboration with EOPTIS and funded by Fondazione CARITRO. UPDATE aims to research, develop and demonstrate innovative solutions for quality control of industrial components. The inspection will be performed merging 3D imaging and Artificial Intelligence solutions and following international standards (VDI/VDE, ASTM, etc.). 

The research activity, in collaboration with various private compaies, investigates innovate optical metrology methods for manufacturing inspection, quality control and production monitoring. We focus on texture-less and non-collaborative surfaces, normally problematic for inspections based on 3D optical methods. 

National projects 

FAIR carries out research activities financed under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) - and by any subsequent funding - in the Artificial Intelligence sector. FAIR tackles the implementation, coordination and management of the "Extended Partnership" linked to thematic area 1 - Artificial Intelligence: Foundational Aspects. FAIR aims to investigate research questions, methodologies, models, technologies and also the ethical and legal rules to build AI systems capable of interacting and collaborating with humans, perceiving and acting within ever-changing contexts. FAIR is split in multiple Spokes which are tacking care of the implementation activities. We are involved in Spoke 2 "Integrative AI" and we will deal with integrative methods that go beyond current approaches based on vertical and separate areas of AI.

The ICSC "National Research Centre" for High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing carries out R&D activities for innovation in the field of simulations, computing and analysis of high-performance data. The National Research Centre is one of the five National Centres established under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).  We are involved in Spoke 4 "Earth and Climate" which aims to create of an interdisciplinary framework that integrates components of the most advanced modeling of the Earth system, to provide the scientific community and users with a flexible, reliable and powerful tool.

iNEST is the ecosystem for innovation of the Italian northeastern region, namely a web of interconnections between research bodies, both public and private, whose aim is to develop a “nest of synergies” for the implementation of digital and ecological transition technologies. iNEST’s fields of inquiry and intervention include manufacturing, agriculture, maritime, mountain, construction, tourism, culture, health and nutrition industries. The iNEST ecosystem is one of the 11 ecosystems established under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).  We are involved in Spoke 3 "Green and digital transition for advanced manufacturing technology".

Scientific initiatives by ISPRS or EuroSDR

Internal projects

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) methods employes advanced, real-time and optmized photogrammetric methods to derive, simultaeously, the camera poses (Localization) and sparse 3D point cloud (Mapping) of the surveyed scene. We are working to add more surveying concepts to SLAM solutions from an hardware and software point of view.

Classification and segmentation of 3D data has become a very active research field. Researchers are developing solutions to deliver enriched 3D information useful in many fields and applications. We are developing methodologies based on modern machine/deep learning methods useful for urban modeling, heritage documentation, etc. 

We explore supervised CNN architectures for monocular depth estimation and evaluated their potential in 3D reconstruction i photogrammetric scenarios and applications. Since most available datasets for training are not designed toward this goal and are limited to specific indoor scenarios, we also offer a new metric, large-scale synthetic benchmark (ArchDepth) renders near real-world scenarios of outdoor scenes (ca 24.000 images). 

Multiple view stereo algorithms still have difficulties to reconstruct the depth in textureless areas. Semantic information is used to support the standard MVS reconstruction and generate more complete and accurate depth maps and 3D point clouds. The semantic labels are inherited from the labelled images to the 3D output.

Single Photon Lidar

If the field of photogrammetry has witnessed incremental technological developments in the last years, the field of airborne laser scanning is now seeing a potentially revolutionary change through the introduction of Single Photon LiDAR (SPL) and Geiger-Mode LiDAR technologies. SPL / Geiger-Mode arguably provide a more efficient approach to perform high-resolution 3D mapping. They offer higher efficiency with respect to traditional linear LiDAR and additional 3D mapping capability in terms of swath width, spatial resolution, acquisition time and density of range returns. The project is in collaboration with EuroSDR, Newcastle University and TU Vienna.

Automation in image orientation and dense point cloud reconstruction is reaching very high standards, but image quality is a fundamental pre-requisite to produce successful and photo-realistic 3D products. We investigate a productive pre-processing strategy, the various detector/descriptor operators for tie point extraction and dense matching algorithms to find out all open issues in the actual photogrammetric pipeline for 3D reconstruction purposes. 

Various countries are digitizing their archives of aerial images as they are a unique and relatively unexplored means to analyze the territorial changes over the past 100 years with very high spatial resolution. This research activity wants to investigate the geo-processing of historical aerial images, including automatic geo-referencing, DSM generation, automatic detection of bomb craters, LULC maps generation, etc. The TIME dataset/benchmark was realized in collaboration with EuroSDR.

In the environmental, cultural, industrial and scientific fields, the need for high-resolution underwater 3D data is constantly increasing. Thanks to the great availability and flexibility in the configuration, photogrammetry is proving its importance for surveying in 3D the underwater scenarios. Our research tasks include camera calibration, 3D modeling, SLAM, etc.

DIGITAL FORESTRY

Monochromatic and multispectral LiDAR are used to study forestry areas for single tree identification, tree species classification, etc. We are developing novel deep learning methods to couple geometric data with added-value information useful for sustainable forest management. The activities are in collaboration with EuroSDR, TU Vienna and FGI.

The availability and reliability of VR/AR/MR solutions, including head-mounted displays and glasses, is allowing interesting immersive virtual experiences in many fields, from industry to heritage.