Investigating the “Altera Forma Urbis”, the secret structural urban form of ancient Rome, by applying a sustainable innovative architectural design methodology for the challenges of the contemporary built environment

The enquiry is based on work by Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Lugli, architect Pier Maria Lugli and Professor Gianfranco Moneta about the “Altera Forma Urbis” of Rome as a hidden, “secret” structural urban form in the shape of a star, to reveal the interconnections with its contemporary form. Through a case study, the paper argues that applying Moneta’s Analysis-Design Interaction methodology (ADI), an historical-morphological process-based analysis to the “Altera Forma Urbis” can be an effective framework to correctly inform the sustainable evolution of the built environment, and consequently, a tool to design architecture which respects the identity of place

Seeing the sound: a new multimodal imaging device for computer vision

Audio imaging can play a fundamental role in computer vision, in particular in automated surveillance, boosting the accuracy of current systems based on standard optical cameras. We present here a new hybrid device for acousticoptic imaging, whose characteristics are tailored to automated surveillance. In particular, the device allows realtime, high frame rate generation of an acoustic map, overlaid over a standard optical image using a geometric calibration of audio and video streams. We demonstrate the potentialities of the device for target tracking on three challenging setup showing the advantages of using acoustic images against baseline algorithms on image tracking. In particular, the proposed approach is able to overcome, often dramatically, visual tracking with state-of-art algorithms, dealing efficiently with occlusions, abrupt variations in visual appearence and camouflage. These results pave the way to a widespread use of acoustic imaging in application scenarios such as in surveillance and security

A Simple Microwave Imaging System for Food Product Inspection through a Symmetry-Based Microwave Imaging Approach

In the food industry, there is a growing demand for cost-effective methods for the inline inspection of food items able to non-invasively detect small foreign bodies that may have contaminated the product during the production process. Microwave imaging may be a valid alternative to the existing technologies, thanks to its inherently low-cost and its capability of sensing low-density contaminants. In this paper, a simple microwave imaging system specifically designed to enable the inspection of a large variety of food products is presented. The system consists of two circularly loaded antipodal Vivaldi antennas with a very large operative band, from 1 to 15 GHz, thus allowing a suitable spatial resolution for different food products, from mostly fatty to high water-content foods. The antennas are arranged in such a way as to collect a signal that can be used to exploit a recently proposed real-time microwave imaging strategy, leveraging the inherent symmetries that usually characterize food items. The system is experimentally characterized, and the achieved results compare favorably with the design specifications and numerical simulations. Relying on these positive results, the first experimental proof of the effectiveness of the entire system is presented confirming its efficacy

Preliminary In-Line Microwave Imaging Experimental Assessment for Food Contamination Monitoring

Food producers must deal with contaminants (wood, plastic, glass) inside packaged products that could lead to customer dissatisfaction. The assessed technologies fail to detect some of these contaminants, leading to the need for new technologies with different signal qualities, such as microwave sensing. This paper presents a preliminary result of a microwave imaging system designed for industrial applications. The measurement system was designed for and works on an industrial conveyor belt where packaged products are scanned. The scanned signals are processed to obtain an accurate 3D image of the size and position of the contaminant inside the food package. In addition to the results, we describe the implemented system and some considerations on data acquisition

Non-Destructive Characterization of Magnetic Polymeric Scaffolds using Terahertz Time-of-Flight Imaging

Magnetic Scaffolds MagS are 3D composite materials, in which magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) are used to load a polymeric matrix. Due to their wide use in various medical applications, there is an increasing demand of advanced techniques for non-destructive quality assessment procedures aimed at verifying the absence of defects and, more generally, dedicated to the characterization of MagS. In this framework, the use of TeraHertz (THz) waves for the non-destructive characterization of multifunctional scaffolds represents an open challenge for the scientific community. This paper deals with an approach for the characterization of MagS by means of a THz time-domain system used in reflection mode. THz analyses are performed on poly($\epsilon$ - capprolactone) (PCL) scaffolds magnetized with iron oxide (Fe $_{3}$ O$_{4}$) MNPs through a drop-casting deposition and tuned to obtain different distributions of MNP in the biomaterial. The proposed data processing approach allows a quantitative characterization MagS, in terms of their (estimated) thickness and refractive index. Moreover, the proposed procedure allows to identify the areas of the scaffold wherein MNP are mainly concentrated and thus, it gives us information about MNP spatial distribution

Advancements in the Experimental Validation of a Wearable Microwave Imaging System for Brain Stroke Monitoring

Stroke is a disease that negatively affect brain oxygenation, so impacting short- and long-term people living conditions or, in the worst case, provoking the death. Brain stroke causes physiological variations in the affected tissues, which in turn produce relevant changes in the permittivity and conductivity of the involved tissues. Such changes can be detected and imaged by processing the scattering response at microwaves of the brain. This work advances the experimental validation of a microwave-based scanner to generate 3-D con- trast dielectric maps, using low-complexity microwave hardware and a real-time standalone linear inversion algorithm based on the distorted Born approximation. The validation herein presented faces non-trivial conditions using anthropomorphic multi-tissue head and stroke phantoms, so replicating a laboratory set-up very close to the clinical scenario

A low-complexity microwave scanner for cerebrovascular diseases monitoring

This work gathers the pathway from the design to the experimental testing of a microwave imaging prototype to monitor brain stroke in real-time conditions, approaching thus the electromagnetic inverse problem of retrieving a dielectric temporal variation within the head. To this end, it presents a low-complexity device consisting of twentytwo custom-made radiating elements working with a linear imaging algorithm based on distorted Born approximation and a truncated singular value decomposition, able to localize, identify and track the stroke evolution. The system is prototyped using a compact two-ports vector analyzer and electromechanical switching matrix. It is assessed experimentally via a mimicked hemorrhagic condition, demonstrating the system’s capabilities to follow up centimetric confined variations, retrieving 3-D maps of the studied cases in real-time

Microwave imaging device prototype for brain stroke 3D monitoring

This paper summarizes the development and the experimental testing of a scanning device, in the microwave range, to monitor brain stroke. The device comprehends 4 main sections: a sensors helmet, a switching matrix, a data acquisition part, and a control/processing core. The sensors in the helmet are 22 custom-made flexible antennas working around 1 GHz, placed conformally to the upper head part. A first validation of the system consists in the detection of a target in the head region. Experimental testing is performed on a single-cavity head phantom, while the target is a balloon mimicking the stroke. The shape of the balloon and phantom are extracted from medical images, and tissues properties are emulated with liquids that resemble their dielectric properties. A differential measurement approach senses the field on the antennas in two different situations, and from their difference computes a 3-D image through a singular value decomposition of the discretized scattering operator obtained from an accurate numerical model. The results verify the capabilities of the system on detecting and monitoring stroke evolution

On the Use of an Electro-Mechanical and a Solid-State Switching Matrix for a Portable Microwave-based Brain Stroke Scanner

This paper examines the effects of the switching matrix on a multi-view and low-complexity portable microwave imaging system for brain stroke monitoring. It considers two switching solutions: an ad-hoc one relying on RF electromechanical switches and a compact off-the-shelf one using solid-state switches. The performed analysis deems path attenuation and inter-channel isolation. It studies the impact of the different components of the scanning time, such as switching, communication, acquisition times, and the system dynamics on imaging performance and monitoring capabilities, optimizing the system setting while identifying system bottlenecks. The system uses an upgraded antenna-matching module and is experimentally validated using a mimicked hemorrhagic stroke-evolving scenario, demonstrating the effectiveness of both switching solutions in tracking and localizing the stroke progression. Tests of repeatability and sensitivity to false positive cases are also reported