Alessio Del Bue Homepage

The exciting aspect of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) is the possibility to work on several aspects of science. This year was indeed very intense, until now I did not quite realise on which extent Computer Vision was applied in the projects we have in our group. While I was trying to put some order in the scientific activities there was something quite surprising. The visual shapes we were dealing with spanned from the smallest biological molecules to astral bodies in space — almost reaching a total of 14 orders of magnitude in size. Here there is a summary from the smallest to the biggest:

• 3D localisation of fluorescent particles for Nanoscopy – 10-8: Localising the tiniest molecules in thick biological samples is a challenge in modern Microscopy. In this project we helped the IIT Nanophysics group to raise the state of the art in terms of accuracy in 3D localisation. More details on the new Nature methods paper here. F. Cella Zanacchi, Z. Lavagnino, M. Perrone, A. Del Bue, L. Furia, M. Faretta, and A. Diaspro, "Live-cell 3D super-resolution imaging in thick biological samples," Nature Methods, pp. 1047-1049, 2011. @Article{Cella:etal:NM2011,   author = {F. {Cella Zanacchi} and Z. Lavagnino and M. {Perrone} and A. {Del Bue} and L. Furia and M. Faretta and A. Diaspro},   title = {{Live-cell 3D super-resolution imaging in thick biological samples}},   journal = {Nature Methods},   pages = {1047-1049},   year = {2011},   month = {December},   url = {http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v8/n12/full/nmeth.1744.html},   Doi = {10.1038/nmeth.1744} } bibtex

• Analysis of the morphology of neuronal networks – 10-5: This ongoing work is based on the in vitro analysis of the morphology of neuronal networks using images from a high-density microelectrode array (MEA). The aim is to extract the positions and links among different cluster of neurons. This information will be coupled together with electro-physiological signals in order to understand the functionality of the network. In collaboration with Alessandro Maccione and Luca Berdondini from the Neuroscience and Brain Technology (NBT) department @ IIT.

• Automatic microphones localisation – 10-2: The set of microphones and the audio arrays in the Cerberus lab need a precise 3D localisation in order to work. Recently we have found a new set of computational tools able to localise the microphone position solely from sound events. The overall accuracy of the system is less then half a centimeter. More news soon!

• 3D deformable modelling – 100: With Multiview 3D warps – M3DW we presented together with A. Bartoli a framework that can model dense deformations of an image from an image sequence. The ideal applications are surface retexturing and deformation cloning. A. Del Bue and A. Bartoli, "Multiview 3D Warps," in 13th Internationl Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2011), Barcelona, Spain, 2011. @inproceedings{DelBue:Bartoli:2011,   author = {A. {Del Bue} and A. Bartoli},   title = {Multiview 3D Warps},   booktitle = {13th Internationl Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2011), Barcelona, Spain},   year = {2011},   month = {November} } bibtex

• Large-scale 3D reconstruction – 103: We have recently extended the BALM algorithm to deal with large-scale reconstruction of a size such as Piazza San Marco in Venice. A new update of the code and the data will be published soon. A. Del Bue, J. Xavier, L. Agapito, and M. Paladini, "Bilinear Factorization via Augmented Lagrange Multipliers," in 11th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2010), Crete, Greece, 2010, pp. 283-296. @inproceedings{DelBue:etal:2010,   author = {A. {Del Bue} and J. Xavier and L. Agapito and M. Paladini},   title = {Bilinear Factorization via Augmented Lagrange Multipliers},   editor = {Kostas Daniilidis and Petros Maragos and Nikos Paragios},   booktitle = {11th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2010), Crete, Greece},   publisher = {Springer},   location = {Heidelberg},   series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},   volume = {6314},   year = {2010},   isbn = {978-3-642-15560-4},   pages = {283--296} } bibtex

• Asteroid 3D reconstruction – 105: We have created in collaboration with the University of Trento a new pipeline for the 3D reconstruction of Asteroids using close approach images. The Lutetia asteroid size is of 100 Km at the diameter!