PROJECTS

AMICOS - Autonomous MonitorIng and COntrol System for mining plants - is a European project funded by the EIT Raw Materials. AMICOS supports the digital transformation of the RM industry by proposing an innovative end-to-end asset management solution, based on a Decision Support System and remotely sensed data, to increase the market penetration/adoption of digital technology in the mining sector. AMICOS provides a great opportunity to gain market share by exploiting emerging technologies (IoT, drones/UAVs, Artificial Intelligence, BIM, etc.) to reduce the costs for key operations and allow a safer working environment. 

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.

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.

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 – 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.). 

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.

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.