Research Activities

Please also look at Pubblications section to have a complete overview of my research activities

  • Natural Human-Computer-Interaction
    In particular the aim of my research is to study the human perception while using human-computer-interaction systems, based on virtual and augmented reality technologies. One aspect of my research is the study of visual perception, visual stress, misperception, visual fatigue and cybersickness, with the aim of finding solutions to overcome such problems. In particular, I have addressed the study of perception by using head-mounted displays (e.g. the Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, HTC Vive), 3D displays (e.g. passive and active 3DTVs), smartphones (e.g. the Cardboard). [video]
  • Development of virtual and augmented reality systems.
    In particular the aim of my research is to study the perception of tridimensionality, through the presentation of virtual stereoscopic 3D stimuli. The application field of this research are the study of the visuo-motor coordination, the development of systems for the cognitive rehabilitation, by using augmented reality systems. In particular the focus of my research is to use low cost and off-the-shelf devices, developed for the entertainment systems (i.e. the motion sensors of the videogame console, or the system for the stereoscopic visualisation of 3D contents, such as the 3DTV). Patent Application: M. Chessa, F. Solari, M. Garibotti, S.P. Sabatini, “Rappresentazione stereoscopica tridimensionale perfezionata di oggetti virtuali per un osservatore in movimento”. Assignee: University of Genoa. Italian Patent application TO2011A001150, 14th December 2011.
  • Active binocular vision systems.
    In particular my research concerns the study of the interplay between the geometry and the behaviour of the active vision systems and the visual scenes. (For further details see the Eyeshots project website www.eyeshots.it)
  • Cortical models for low level features extraction.
    In particular my research focuses on the development of cortical models for the estimation of optic flow and disparity, based on distributed populations of cells, inspired by the processing of cortical areas V1 and MT. Part of this work is described in my PhD thesis.
  • Context-sensitive receptive fields for the analysis of visual motion.
    In particular my research focuses on an higher order analysis of visual motion, for the evaluation of the time-to-contact and for the 3D reconstruction of the surfaces. Part of this work is described in my PhD thesis.
  • Visual processing in foveated systems
    In particular, I have addressed the problem of the multi-orientation and multiscale filtering in the log-polar domain. To this aim, a systematic analysis of the relationships between the parameters of the discrete log-polar mapping and of a bank of Gabor filters has been carried out.. Moreover, a complete vision systems, based on the cortical representation of the visual signal, and on the first stages of brain processing (in particular V1-MT-MST areas) has been developed.
  • Software tools for vision systems.
    In particular my research concerns the developing of software tools for the simulation of robotic systems and the developing of neuromorphic algorithms by using graphics processing units (GPGPU).
  • Benchmarking dataset
    I have used virtual reality tools and computer graphics to create a dataset of benchmarking sequences and stereo pairs, also with vergent stereo cameras. (see here for further details)