The David restoration project (started in Florence in 2002) has given several guidelines to the definition and development of innovative solutions to process and visualize 3D data in the framework of Cultural Heritage (CH) applications. Our main goal has been to demonstrate the usefulness of digital 3D models and of visualization tools in the framework of a restoration project. 3D models have b...

The scientific discipline of active restoration of denuded coral reef areas has drawn much attention in the past decade as it became evident that this ecosystem does not often recover naturally from anthropogenic stress without manipulation. Essentially, the choices are eitherthe continuous degradation of the reefs or active restoration to encourage reef development. As a result, worldwide rest...

The fact that multimedia services have become the major driver for next generation wireless networks underscores their technological and economic impact. A vast majority of these multimedia services are consumer-centric and therefore must guarantee a certain level of perceptual quality. Given the massive volumes of image and video data in question, it is only natural to adopt automatic quality ...

Despite the ubiquitous usage in a wide variety of signal processing applications, the mean squared error (MSE) appears to be a poor measure when perceived image quality is our major concern. It is widely employed mostly because of its simplicity and good mathematical properties for optimization purposes. Among the recently proposed IQA approaches, the structural similarity (SSIM) index has emer...

Ecological restoration, particularly in urban contexts, is a complex collective decision-making process that involves a diversity of stakeholders and experts, each with their own perceptions and preferences about what landscapes should and can look like, how to get them to the desired state, and on what timeline. We investigate how structural and behavioral factors may influence collective deci...

In this paper we address the image restoration problem in the variational framework. The focus is set on denoising applications. Natural image statistics are consistent with a Markov random field (MRF) model for the image structure. Thus in a restoration process attention must be paid to the spatial correlation between adjacent pixels.The proposed approach minimizes the conditional entropy of a...

Image restoration algorithms are typically evaluated by some distortion measure (e.g. PSNR, SSIM) or by human opinion scores that directly quantify perceived perceptual quality. In this paper, we prove mathematically that distortion and perceptual quality are at odds with each other. Specifically, we study the optimal probability for discriminating the outputs of an image restoration algorithm ...

RATIONALE Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is an established treatment for patients with chronic heart failure. However, CRT-associated structural and functional remodeling at cellular and subcellular levels is only partly understood. OBJECTIVE To investigate the effects of CRT on subcellular structures and protein distributions associated with excitation-contraction coupling of ventri...