Gianni Vercelli

Luca Martini, Daniele Zolezzi, Saverio Iacono et al.

The reconstruction of low-resolution football broadcast images presents a significant challenge in sports broadcasting, where detailed visuals are essential for analysis and audience engagement. This study introduces a multi-stage generative upscaling framework leveraging Diffusion Models to enhance degraded images, transforming inputs as small as $64 \times 64$ pixels into high-fidelity $1024 \times 1024$ outputs. By integrating an image-to-image pipeline, ControlNet conditioning, and LoRA fine-tuning, our approach surpasses traditional upscaling methods in restoring intricate textures and domain-specific elements such as player details and jersey logos. The custom LoRA is trained on a custom football dataset, ensuring adaptability to sports broadcast needs. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over conventional models, with ControlNet refining fine details and LoRA enhancing task-specific elements. These findings highlight the potential of diffusion-based image reconstruction in sports media, paving the way for future applications in automated video enhancement and real-time sports analytics.

Floriana Benedetti, Alessio Capitanelli, Fulvio Mastrogiovanni et al.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly useful for tasks which require the acquisition of data over large areas. The coverage problem, i.e., the problem of periodically visiting all subregions of an area at a desired frequency, is especially interesting because of its practical applications, both in industry and long-term monitoring of areas hit by a natural disaster. We focus here on the latter scenario, and take into consideration its peculiar characteristic, i.e. the a coverage system should be resilient to a changing environment and not be dependent on pre-existing infrastructures for communication. To this purpose, we designed a novel algorithm for online area coverage and simultaneous signal relay that allows a UAV to cover an area freely, while a variable number of other UAVs provide a stable communication with the base and support in the coverage process at the same time. Finally, a test architecture based on the algorithm has been developed and tests have been performed. By comparison with a simple relay chain system, our approach employs up to 64% less time to reach a certain goal of coverage iterations over the map with only 17% worse average communication cost and no impact on the worst case communication cost.