La presenza dei cristiani in Sicilia in et\ue0 islamica: considerazioni preliminari relative a Palermo e ad Agrigento

La presenza delle comunit\ue0 cristiane nella Sicilia islamica, nota dalla fonti scritte, \ue8 stata da sempre sottovalutata dalla ricerca archeologica. In questo articolo si \ue8 cercato di mettere in evidenza le labili tracce di queste comunit\ue0 in due grandi citt\ue0 della Sicilia islamica: Palermo ed Agrigento

Lo scavo della Chiesa di Santa Maria Degli Angeli alla Gancia: indicatori archeologici della prima età islamica a Palermo

Lo scavo in occasione del restauro della chiesa di Santa Maria degli Angeli alla Gancia a Palermo ha permesso di recuperare alcune stratigrafie affidabili relative alla prima età islamica a Palermo. Lo studio della ceramica ha restituito una serie di indicatori cronologici per il IX-X secolo nonché di proporre nuove cronologie per alcune classi di materiali. Relativamente alla storia della città questo scavo ha aggiunto alcune note importanti che riguardano il porto e la cittadella e mirale la al-Halisah

A knowledge based architecture for the virtual restoration of ancient photos

Historical images are essential documents of the recent past. Nevertheless, time and bad preservation corrupt their physical supports. Digitization can be the solution to extend their \u201clives\u201d, and digital techniques can be used to recover lost information. This task is often difficult and time-consuming, if commercial restoration tools are used for the purpose. A new solution is proposed to help non-expert users in restoring their damaged photos. First, we defined a dual taxonomy for the defects in printed and digitized photos. We represented our restoration domain with an ontology and we created some rules to suggest actions to perform in case of some specific events. Classes and properties of the ontology are included into a knowledge base, that grows dynamically with its use. A prototypal tool and a web application version have been implemented as an interface to the database, and to support non-expert users in the restoration process

Exploiting Visual Saliency Algorithms for Object-Based Attention: A New Color and Scale-Based Approach

Visual Saliency aims to detect the most important regions of an image from a perceptual point of view. More in detail, the goal of Visual Saliency is to build a Saliency Map revealing the salient subset of a given image by analyzing bottom-up and top-down factors of Visual Attention. In this paper we proposed a new method for Saliency detection based on colour and scale analysis, extending our previous work based on SIFT spatial density inspection. We conducted several experiments to study the relationships between saliency methods and the object attention processes and we collected experimental data by tracking the eye movements of thirty viewers in the first three seconds of observation of several images. More precisely, we used a dataset that consists of images with an object in the foreground on an homogeneous background. We are interested in studying the performance of our saliency method with respect to the real fixation maps collected during the experiments. We compared the performances of our method with several state of the art methods with very encouraging resul

Dati sulla circolazione della ceramica e sulle rotte del medioevo occidentale attraverso i contesti tardoantichi e medievali di Marettimo

In this paper will be described the ceramic found in the site Contrada Case Romane in the island of Marettimo. On this site a monastic community was founded in the end of the 5th century. This settlement was destroyed in the 8th century and a new one founded in the same location under Norman rule (end of 11th century). The items discovered prove that between the 5th and the 7th century the island was part of a Mediterranean route linking Africa with Rome and the main locations of the western Mediterranean sea. The findings of amphorae produced in the central-southern Tyrrhenian sea between the end of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th century reveal the close relationship of this monastic settlement with the great ecclesiastic praesidia of the Campi Flegrei. Ceramic belonging to the Norman period and to the 13th century does not differ from the one found in other Sicilian sites; this fact confirms the dependency from mainland of the tiny community living in the island

Combining Top-down and Bottom-up Visual Saliency for Firearms Localization

Object detection is one of the most challenging issues for computer vision researchers. The analysis of the human visual attention mechanisms can help automatic inspection systems, in order to discard useless information and improving performances and efficiency. In this paper we proposed our attention based method to estimate firearms position in images of people holding firearms. Both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms are involved in our system. The bottom-up analysis is based on a state-of-the-art approach. The top-down analysis is based on the construction of a probabilistic model of the firearms position with respect to the people\u2019s face position. This model has been created by analyzing information from of a public available database of movie frames representing actors holding firearms

Convolutional architectures for virtual screening

Background: A Virtual Screening algorithm has to adapt to the different stages of this process. Early screening needs to ensure that all bioactive compounds are ranked in the first positions despite of the number of false positives, while a second screening round is aimed at increasing the prediction accuracy. Results: A novel CNN architecture is presented to this aim, which predicts bioactivity of candidate compounds on CDK1 using a combination of molecular fingerprints as their vector representation, and has been trained suitably to achieve good results as regards both enrichment factor and accuracy in different screening modes (98.55% accuracy in active-only selection, and 98.88% in high precision discrimination). Conclusion: The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art ML approaches, and some interesting insights on molecular fingerprints are devised

A dataset of annotated omnidirectional videos for distancing applications

Omnidirectional (or 360◦ ) cameras are acquisition devices that, in the next few years, could have a big impact on video surveillance applications, research, and industry, as they can record a spherical view of a whole environment from every perspective. This paper presents two new contributions to the research community: the CVIP360 dataset, an annotated dataset of 360◦ videos for distancing applications, and a new method to estimate the distances of objects in a scene from a single 360◦ image. The CVIP360 dataset includes 16 videos acquired outdoors and indoors, annotated by adding information about the pedestrians in the scene (bounding boxes) and the distances to the camera of some points in the 3D world by using markers at fixed and known intervals. The proposed distance estimation algorithm is based on geometry facts regarding the acquisition process of the omnidirectional device, and is uncalibrated in practice: the only required parameter is the camera height. The proposed algorithm was tested on the CVIP360 dataset, and empirical results demonstrate that the estimation error is negligible for distancing applications

Image Content Enhancement Through Salient Regions Segmentation for People With Color Vision Deficiencies

Color vision deficiencies affect visual perception of colors and, more generally, color images. Several sciences such as genetics, biology, medicine, and computer vision are involved in studying and analyzing vision deficiencies. As we know from visual saliency findings, human visual system tends to fix some specific points and regions of the image in the first seconds of observation summing up the most important and meaningful parts of the scene. In this article, we provide some studies about human visual system behavior differences between normal and color vision-deficient visual systems. We eye-tracked the human fixations in first 3 seconds of observation of color images to build real fixation point maps. One of our contributions is to detect the main differences between the aforementioned human visual systems related to color vision deficiencies by analyzing real fixation maps among people with and without color vision deficiencies. Another contribution is to provide a method to enhance color regions of the image by using a detailed color mapping of the segmented salient regions of the given image. The segmentation is performed by using the difference between the original input image and the corresponding color blind altered image. A second eye-tracking of color blind people with the images enhanced by using recoloring of segmented salient regions reveals that the real fixation points are then more coherent (up to 10%) with the normal visual system. The eye-tracking data collected during our experiments are in a publicly available dataset called Eye-Tracking of Color Vision Deficiencies

Photocatalytic and oxidative synthetic pathways for highly efficient PANI-TIO2 nanocomposites as organic and inorganic pollutant sorbents

Polyaniline (PANI)-materials have recently been proposed for environmental remediation applications thanks to PANI stability and sorption properties. As an alternative to conventional PANI oxidative syntheses, which involve toxic carcinogenic compounds, an eco-friendly procedure was here adopted starting from benign reactants (aniline-dimer and H2O2) and initiated by ultraviolet (UV)-irradiated TiO2. To unlock the full potential of this procedure, we investigated the roles of TiO2 and H2O2 in the nanocomposites synthesis, with the aim of tailoring the properties of the final material to the desired application. The nanocomposites prepared by varying the TiO2:H2O2:aniline-dimer molar ratios were characterized for their thermal, optical, morphological, structural and surface properties. The reaction mechanism was investigated via mass analyses and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The nanocomposites were tested on both methyl orange and hexavalent chromium removal. A fast dye-sorption was achieved also in the presence of interferents and the recovery of the dye was obtained upon eco-friendly conditions. An efficient Cr(VI) abatement was obtained also after consecutive tests and without any regeneration treatment. The fine understanding of the reaction mechanism allowed us to interpret the pollutant-removal performances of the different materials, leading to tailored nanocomposites in terms of maximum sorption and reduction capability upon consecutive tests even in simulated drinking water