Expertise

UAV, feature extraction, 3D modelling, 3D mapping, LiDAR, photogrammetry

Prizes and awards

• Finalist at the Licinio Ferretti Awards 2010 (supported by BLOM-CGR S.p.A.)
• Winner at the Licinio Ferretti Awards 2011 (supported by BLOM-CGR S.p.A.)
• Sensors (MDPI) Best Paper Awards 2013

See also: Francesco's publications on ResearchGate

Activities in education

The duties in education cover core modules of Photogrammetry, UAV and 3D modeling.

• Teaching basics in photogrammetry and 3D modelling in GeoInformatics Master courses.
• Teaching photogrammetry and computer vision in S&C Master course.
• Member of the Programme Committee of the Master in Systems and Control
• Supervised/co-supervised MSc and PhD theses.

He is currently the coordinator of two courses:

• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Earth Observation (GeoInformatics)
• 2D and 3D Scene Analysis (Systems & Control)

Activities in research

Within the topic "UAV-based Geoinformatics" the current focus is on geometric and semantic information extraction from UAV images.

Ongoing projects and activities:

• Chair of UAV-g 2019
• ISPRS ICWG I/II Chairman - Unmanned Vehicles Systems (UVS): Sensors and Applications.
• EU-Project Its4Land
• EU-Project Panoptis
• EU-Project Ingenious
• EFRO UIVER project

Completed Projects at the University of Twente:

• PI of the ISPRS Scientific Initiative on "Multi-platform Very High Resolution Photogrammetry".
• PI of the eScience Path-Finding Project: Improving Open-source photogrammetric workflows for processing big datasets.
• EU-Project RECONASS
• EU-Project INACHUS
• EU-Project Slice3D
• STW-Project MM-POS optimization

A leaflet describing our activities in the area of mapping from UAV at ITC can be downloaded here.

Relevant past projects:

• RapidMap: CONCERT- Japan project (EU funded project in the International Cooperation Activities under the Capacities Programme of the F.P.7th for Research and Technology Development - http://rapidmap.fbk.eu/)
• Galileo Project 2013-2014: Automated scene information extraction from a joint analysis of aerial remote sensing images and their photogrammetric DSM - Partner: Grenoble Institute of Technology (Grenoble INP) -  GIPSA Lab, France
• STEM Project: the project is commissioned by the Autonomous Province of Trento.
• COSCH Project: Cost Action TD 1201 (Short Term Scientific Mission)
• CIEM Project (Cartographic Information Extraction and Management): co-founded Marie-Curie Actions 7th F.P. - PCOFOUND- GA-2008-226070, acronym “Trentino Project”