Publications (51)
Single and Multiple Illuminant Estimation Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Simone Bianco, Claudio Cusano, Raimondo Schettini
In this paper we present a method for the estimation of the color of the illuminant in RAW images. The method includes a Convolutional Neural Network that has been specially design…
CURL: Co-trained Unsupervised Representation Learning for Image Classification
Simone Bianco, Gianluigi Ciocca, Claudio Cusano
In this paper we propose a strategy for semi-supervised image classification that leverages unsupervised representation learning and co-training. The strategy, that is called CURL…
Optimal periodic closure for minimizing risk in emerging disease outbreaks
Jason Hindes, Simone Bianco, Ira B. Schwartz
Without vaccines and treatments, societies must rely on non-pharmaceutical intervention strategies to control the spread of emerging diseases such as COVID-19. Though complete lock…
Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics of viral evolution
Barbara A. Jones, Justin Lessler, Simone Bianco +1
This paper analyzes a simplified model of viral infection and evolution using the 'grand canonical ensemble' and formalisms from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to enumera…
Large age-gap face verification by feature injection in deep networks
Simone Bianco
This paper introduces a new method for face verification across large age gaps and also a dataset containing variations of age in the wild, the Large Age-Gap (LAG) dataset, with im…
Detecting long and short memory via spectral methods
Simone Bianco
We study the properties of memory of a financial time series adopting two different methods of analysis, the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and the analysis of the power spec…
How Far Can You Get By Combining Change Detection Algorithms?
Simone Bianco, Gianluigi Ciocca, Raimondo Schettini
Given the existence of many change detection algorithms, each with its own peculiarities and strengths, we propose a combination strategy, that we termed IUTIS (In Unity There Is S…
Benchmark Analysis of Representative Deep Neural Network Architectures
Simone Bianco, Remi Cadene, Luigi Celona +1
This work presents an in-depth analysis of the majority of the deep neural networks (DNNs) proposed in the state of the art for image recognition. For each DNN multiple performance…
Illuminant-Adaptive 3D Lookup Tables for Camera Color Correction
Claudio Rota, Luca Cogo, Simone Bianco +1
The paper introduces an illuminant-adaptive 3D lookup table (C²LUT) for camera color correction that handles a wide range of LED illuminants using a chromaticity-aware representati…
User Preferences Modeling and Learning for Pleasing Photo Collage Generation
Simone Bianco, Gianluigi Ciocca
In this paper we consider how to automatically create pleasing photo collages created by placing a set of images on a limited canvas area. The task is formulated as an optimization…
Epidemics with Multistrain Interactions: The Interplay Between Cross Immunity and Antibody-Dependent Enhancement
Simone Bianco, Leah B. Shaw, Ira B. Schwartz
This paper examines the interplay of the effect of cross immunity and antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) in mutistrain diseases. Motivated by dengue fever, we study a model for t…
Rehabilitating the ColorChecker Dataset for Illuminant Estimation
Ghalia Hemrit, Graham D. Finlayson, Arjan Gijsenij +5
In a previous work, it was shown that there is a curious problem with the benchmark ColorChecker dataset for illuminant estimation. To wit, this dataset has at least 3 different se…
Multitask Painting Categorization by Deep Multibranch Neural Network
Simone Bianco, Davide Mazzini, Paolo Napoletano +1
In this work we propose a new deep multibranch neural network to solve the tasks of artist, style, and genre categorization in a multitask formulation. In order to gather clues fro…
Aesthetics Assessment of Images Containing Faces
Simone Bianco, Luigi Celona, Raimondo Schettini
Recent research has widely explored the problem of aesthetics assessment of images with generic content. However, few approaches have been specifically designed to predict the aest…
The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report
Bin Ren, Hang Guo, Lei Sun +143
This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep mode…
Unexpected volatility and intraday serial correlation
Simone Bianco, Roberto Renó
We study the impact of volatility on intraday serial correlation, at time scales of less than 20 minutes, exploiting a data set with all transaction on SPX500 futures from 1993 to…
Fluorescence intermittency in blinking quantum dots: renewal or slow modulation?
Simone Bianco, Paolo Grigolini, Paolo Paradisi
We study time series produced by the blinking quantum dots, by means of an aging experiment, and we examine the results of this experiment in the light of two distinct approaches t…
Shallow camera pipeline for night photography rendering
Simone Zini, Claudio Rota, Marco Buzzelli +2
We introduce a camera pipeline for rendering visually pleasing photographs in low light conditions, as part of the NTIRE2022 Night Photography Rendering challenge. Given the nature…
On using AI for EEG-based BCI applications: problems, current challenges and future trends
Thomas Barbera, Jacopo Burger, Alessandro D'Amelio +6
Imagine unlocking the power of the mind to communicate, create, and even interact with the world around us. Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in how…
Aging in Financial Market
Simone Bianco, Paolo Grigolini
We analyze the data of the Italian and U.S. futures on the stock markets and we test the validity of the Continuous Time Random Walk assumption for the survival probability of the…
DEAR: Dataset for Evaluating the Aesthetics of Rendering
Vsevolod Plohotnuk, Artyom Panshin, Nikola BaniÄ +3
Traditional Image Quality Assessment~(IQA) focuses on quantifying technical degradations such as noise, blur, or compression artifacts, using both full-reference and no-reference o…
NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Night Photography Rendering
Egor Ershov, Artyom Panshin, Oleg Karasev +47
This paper presents a review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge on night photography rendering. The goal of the challenge was to find solutions that process raw camera images taken in nig…
Color Constancy Using CNNs
Simone Bianco, Claudio Cusano, Raimondo Schettini
In this work we describe a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to accurately predict the scene illumination. Taking image patches as input, the CNN works in the spatial domain witho…
Visual RAG: Expanding MLLM visual knowledge without fine-tuning
Mirco Bonomo, Simone Bianco
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved notable performance in computer vision tasks that require reasoning across visual and textual modalities, yet their capabilit…
Semi-supervised cross-lingual speech emotion recognition
Mirko Agarla, Simone Bianco, Luigi Celona +5
Performance in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) on a single language has increased greatly in the last few years thanks to the use of deep learning techniques. However, cross-lingu…
Deep Residual Autoencoder for quality independent JPEG restoration
Simone Zini, Simone Bianco, Raimondo Schettini
In this paper we propose a deep residual autoencoder exploiting Residual-in-Residual Dense Blocks (RRDB) to remove artifacts in JPEG compressed images that is independent from the…
Maximal Sensitive Dependence and the Optimal Path to Epidemic Extinction
Eric Forgoston, Simone Bianco, Leah B. Shaw +1
Extinction of an epidemic or a species is a rare event that occurs due to a large, rare stochastic fluctuation. Although the extinction process is dynamically unstable, it follows…
Brain, Music and non-Poisson Renewal Processes
Simone Bianco, Massimiliano Ignaccolo, Mark S. Rider +3
In this paper we show that both music composition and brain function, as revealed by the Electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis, are renewal non-Poisson processes living in the non-er…
NTIRE 2024 Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Content Challenge
Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai +111
This paper reports on the NTIRE 2024 Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Content Challenge, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancemen…
Adaptive Epidemic Forecasting and Community Risk Evaluation of COVID-19
Vishrawas Gopalakrishnan, Sayali Navalekar, Pan Ding +7
Pandemic control measures like lock-down, restrictions on restaurants and gatherings, social-distancing have shown to be effective in curtailing the spread of COVID-19. However, th…
Hamiltonian analysis of subcritical stochastic epidemic dynamics
Lee Worden, Ira B. Schwartz, Simone Bianco +3
We extend a technique of approximation of the long-term behavior of a supercritical stochastic epidemic model, using the WKB approximation and a Hamiltonian phase space, to the sub…
Generic Properties of Random Gene Regulatory Networks
Zhiyuan Li, Simone Bianco, Zhaoyang Zhang +1
Modeling gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is an important topic in systems biology. Although there has been much work focusing on various specific systems, the generic behavior of G…
Automated Pruning for Deep Neural Network Compression
Franco Manessi, Alessandro Rozza, Simone Bianco +2
In this work we present a method to improve the pruning step of the current state-of-the-art methodology to compress neural networks. The novelty of the proposed pruning technique…
Improving Image Captioning Descriptiveness by Ranking and LLM-based Fusion
Luigi Celona, Simone Bianco, Marco Donzella +1
State-of-The-Art (SoTA) image captioning models are often trained on the MicroSoft Common Objects in Context (MS-COCO) dataset, which contains human-annotated captions with an aver…
Deep Learning for Logo Recognition
Simone Bianco, Marco Buzzelli, Davide Mazzini +1
In this paper we propose a method for logo recognition using deep learning. Our recognition pipeline is composed of a logo region proposal followed by a Convolutional Neural Networ…
Renewal Aging as Emerging Property of Phase Synchronization
Simone Bianco, Elvis Geneston, Paolo Grigolini +1
In this letter we examine a model recently proposed to produce phase synchronization [K. Wood et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 145701 (2006)] and we show that the onset to synchronizati…
On the Use of Deep Learning for Blind Image Quality Assessment
Simone Bianco, Luigi Celona, Paolo Napoletano +1
In this work we investigate the use of deep learning for distortion-generic blind image quality assessment. We report on different design choices, ranging from the use of features…
Serial correlation and heterogeneous volatility in financial markets: beyond the LeBaron effect
Simone Bianco, Fulvio Corsi, Roberto Reno'
We study the relation between serial correlation of financial returns and volatility at intraday level for the S&P500 stock index. At daily and weekly level, serial correlation and…
Leveraging Multispectral Sensors for Color Correction in Mobile Cameras
Luca Cogo, Marco Buzzelli, Simone Bianco +2
Recent advances in snapshot multispectral (MS) imaging have enabled compact, low-cost spectral sensors for consumer and mobile devices. By capturing richer spectral information tha…
Illumination Estimation Challenge: experience of past two years
Egor Ershov, Alex Savchik, Ilya Semenkov +15
Illumination estimation is the essential step of computational color constancy, one of the core parts of various image processing pipelines of modern digital cameras. Having an acc…
Disentangling Image Distortions in Deep Feature Space
Simone Bianco, Luigi Celona, Paolo Napoletano
Previous literature suggests that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations. Experiments conducted on a dataset of human-judged image…
Unified Framework for Identity and Imagined Action Recognition from EEG patterns
Marco Buzzelli, Simone Bianco, Paolo Napoletano
We present a unified deep learning framework for the recognition of user identity and the recognition of imagined actions, based on electroencephalography (EEG) signals, for applic…
AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video: Dataset, Methods and Results
Ren Yang, Radu Timofte, Xin Li +49
This paper reviews the Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video at AIM 2022. This challenge includes two tracks. Track 1 aims at the super-resolution of compress…
Cross-Camera Distracted Driver Classification through Feature Disentanglement and Contrastive Learning
Luigi Celona, Simone Bianco, Paolo Napoletano
The classification of distracted drivers is pivotal for ensuring safe driving. Previous studies demonstrated the effectiveness of neural networks in automatically predicting driver…
Embedded System to Detect, Track and Classify Plankton Using a Lensless Video Microscope
Thomas G. Zimmerman, Vito P. Pastore, Sujoy K. Biswas +1
Plankton provide the foundation for life on earth. To advance our understanding of the marine ecosystem, for scientific, commercial and survival purposes, more in situ continuous m…
Pathspace Kalman Filters with Dynamic Process Uncertainty for Analyzing Time-course Data
Chaitra Agrahar, William Poole, Simone Bianco +1
Kalman Filter (KF) is an optimal linear state prediction algorithm, with applications in fields as diverse as engineering, economics, robotics, and space exploration. Here, we deve…
Asymmetry in the presence of migration stabilizes multistrain disease outbreaks
Simone Bianco, Leah B. Shaw
We study the effect of migration between coupled populations, or patches, on the stability properties of multistrain disease dynamics. The epidemic model used in this work displays…
Converging towards the optimal path to extinction
Ira B. Schwartz, Eric Forgoston, Simone Bianco +1
Extinction appears ubiquitously in many fields, including chemical reactions, population biology, evolution, and epidemiology. Even though extinction as a random process is a rare…
Face anonymization preserving facial expressions and photometric realism
Luigi Celona, Simone Bianco, Raimondo Schettini
The widespread sharing of face images on social media platforms and in large-scale datasets raises pressing privacy concerns, as biometric identifiers can be exploited without cons…
Insular microbiogeography
James H. Kaufman, Christopher A. Elkins, Matthew Davis +10
The diversity revealed by large scale genomics in microbiology is calling into question long held beliefs about genome stability, evolutionary rate, even the definition of a specie…
A fluctuating environment as a source of periodic modulation
Simone Bianco, Paolo Grigolini, Paolo Paradisi
We study the intermittent fluorescence of a single molecule, jumping from the "light on" to the "light off" state, as a Poisson process modulated by a fluctuating environment. We s…