Filippo Basso

António J. Abreu, Luís A. Alexandre, João A. Santos et al.

Remote sensing is the process of detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of an area by measuring its reflected and emitted radiation at a distance. It is being broadly used to monitor ecosystems, mainly for their preservation. Ever-growing reports of invasive species have affected the natural balance of ecosystems. Exotic invasive species have a critical impact when introduced into new ecosystems and may lead to the extinction of native species. In this study, we focus on Ludwigia peploides, considered by the European Union as an aquatic invasive species. Its presence can negatively impact the surrounding ecosystem and human activities such as agriculture, fishing, and navigation. Our goal was to develop a method to identify the presence of the species. We used images collected by a drone-mounted multispectral sensor to achieve this, creating our LudVision data set. To identify the targeted species on the collected images, we propose a new method for detecting Ludwigia p. in multispectral images. The method is based on existing state-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods modified to handle multispectral data. The proposed method achieved a producer's accuracy of 79.9% and a user's accuracy of 95.5%.

Nana Yaw Asabere, Feng Xia, Wei Wang et al.

This research addresses recommending presentation sessions at smart conferences to participants. We propose a venue recommendation algorithm, Socially-Aware Recommendation of Venues and Environments (SARVE). SARVE computes correlation and social characteristic information of conference participants. In order to model a recommendation process using distributed community detection, SARVE further integrates the current context of both the smart conference community and participants. SARVE recommends presentation sessions that may be of high interest to each participant. We evaluate SARVE using a real world dataset. In our experiments, we compare SARVE to two related state-of-the-art methods, namely: Context-Aware Mobile Recommendation Services (CAMRS) and Conference Navigator (Recommender) Model. Our experimental results show that in terms of the utilized evaluation metrics: precision, recall, and f-measure, SARVE achieves more reliable and favorable social (relations and context) recommendation results.

Filippo Basso, Emanuele Menegatti, Alberto Pretto

Color-depth cameras (RGB-D cameras) have become the primary sensors in most robotics systems, from service robotics to industrial robotics applications. Typical consumer-grade RGB-D cameras are provided with a coarse intrinsic and extrinsic calibration that generally does not meet the accuracy requirements needed by many robotics applications (e.g., highly accurate 3D environment reconstruction and mapping, high precision object recognition and localization, ...). In this paper, we propose a human-friendly, reliable and accurate calibration framework that enables to easily estimate both the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of a general color-depth sensor couple. Our approach is based on a novel two components error model. This model unifies the error sources of RGB-D pairs based on different technologies, such as structured-light 3D cameras and time-of-flight cameras. Our method provides some important advantages compared to other state-of-the-art systems: it is general (i.e., well suited for different types of sensors), based on an easy and stable calibration protocol, provides a greater calibration accuracy, and has been implemented within the ROS robotics framework. We report detailed experimental validations and performance comparisons to support our statements.

Feng Xia, Nana Yaw Asabere, Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues et al.

Current research environments are witnessing high enormities of presentations occurring in different sessions at academic conferences. This situation makes it difficult for researchers (especially juniors) to attend the right presentation session(s) for effective collaboration. In this paper, we propose an innovative venue recommendation algorithm to enhance smart conference participation. Our proposed algorithm, Social Aware Recommendation of Venues and Environments (SARVE), computes the Pearson Correlation and social characteristic information of conference participants. SARVE further incorporates the current context of both the smart conference community and participants in order to model a recommendation process using distributed community detection. Through the integration of the above computations and techniques, we are able to recommend presentation sessions of active participant presenters that may be of high interest to a particular participant. We evaluate SARVE using a real world dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that SARVE outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.