Personale docente

Andrea Prati is born in Modena in the 1973. He received the Laurea in Computer Engineering in the 1998 at the University of Modena (110/110 cum Laude). He received the Ph.D in Information Engineering in 2002 at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. During the last year of his Ph.D. studies he spent 6 months at the CVRR (Computer Vision and Robotics Research) laboratory of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), USA. During this period he participated to the advanced research project called ATON (Autonomous Agents for On-Scene Networked Incident Management). The objective of this project, funded by the transportation agency of California (CalTrans), was to develop integrated systems with cameras and sensors for traffic-incident detection, monitoring and recovery. After his Ph.D, he has collaborated with a two-year research grant with the Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, and, then, with a collaboration on research acitivites in the field of distributed video-surveillance.

From 18/01/2005 to 31/10/2011 Andrea Prati has been an Assistant Professor of ING/INF-05 (Sistemi di elaborazione delle informazioni) at the Faculty of Engineering - Reggio Emilia - and he was affiliated to the Dipartimento di Scienze e Metodi dell’Ingegneria. From November 2011 to November 2015 he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Design and Planning in Complex Environments at the University IUAV of Venice. Starting 5/12/2015 he has moved as Associate Professor at the University of Parma at the Department of Engineering and Architecture (former Department of Information Engineering). Starting 28/2/2019 he has been promoted to Full Professor at the same department.

He collaborates to research projects at regional, national, European and international level.The main research project are the following.
At regional level (Piano telematico Emilia-Romagna), he actively participated as task leader to the project L.A.I.C.A. (Laboratorio di Ambient Intelligence per una Citta' Amica - Laboratory of Ambient Intelligence for a Friendly City - two-year project in collaboration with several universities and companies in Emilia-Romagna). The project consists in the development of advanced services for the citizens. Andrea Prati worked on the detection, tracking and modelling of people in multi-camera environments.
At national level he participated to the PRIN 2006 FREE SURF project aiming at introducing new paradigms of video surveillance from fixed, mobile and hybrid cameras, which must be also compliant to privacy laws.
At European level, he participated to the Network of Excellence DELOS on Digital Libraries, working on the annotation and transcoding of digital libraries of sport events and recently to the project THIS (Transport Hub Intelligent video System) funded by the programme "Prevention, Preparedness and Consequence Management of Terrorism and other Security-related Risks" of DG JLS of European Commission.
At international level he is scientific responsible of the project BE SAFE (2006-2010) under the NATO funding scheme Science for Peace. The project, in collaboration with Prof. Naftali Thisby of Hebrew University (Israel), has the main objective to evaluate new machine learning methods for abnormal behavior analysis with the aim of preventing terrorist attacks.

He collaborates with the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, in the field of a research project called "LittleBrother: Vision Systems Supporting Detection of Offenders in Public Places" aimed at the research in distributed video-surveillance. He is scientific vice-manager of the research contract with the Belgian company Traficon, N.V., world leader in vision-based systems for traffic control.
Moreover, he has collaborated with several local companies in specific research projects. Among the many, the two-year collaboration with Marchesini Group SpA located at Pianoro(BO) has resulted in a patent, of which Andrea Prati is co-author.

His research interests belong basically to 6 fields:
- Computer vision and pattern recognition for creative industries: thanks to the multi-year collaboration with Adidas AG, Andrea Prati has recently (since 2016) worked on the application of computer vision and pattern recognition for the automatic analysis and classification of appareal images (both 2D and 3D)
- Development of sensor networks based on embedded devices (including smart phones) for applications of computer vision, such as object/landmark recognition from mobile cameras and facial expression analysis for automatic mood recognition
- Performance analysis of multimedia computer architectures: in this field, he has contributed to the definition of original pre-fetching techniques for caches in order to improve the access to images and videos
- Motion analysis: in particular, he worked and currently works on the study models and algorithms for the detection and tracking of moving objects; on the analysis of people postures for the identification of dangerous situations, such as falls; on the object tracking in distributed, multi-camera environments; on the analysis of traffic; on the analysis and removal of the shadows; on the applications of these techniques in domotics
- Semantic video transcoding: in this research field, Andrea Prati has worked (in collaboration with the University of Florence) on the automatic annotation and transcoding of both surveillance and sport videos, with the aim of providing, on the one side, a semantic coding which permits to compress less the interesting objects and compress more non-interesting ones, and, on the other side, a methodology for the evaluation of the quality of the entire process annotation-transcoding with user-centred performance metrics;
- Various topics: he worked on different topics of computer vision, also in industrial scenarios, as the tonal and defect control for ceramic tiles (Teklab Srl), the localization of pallets for automatic logistics (Infovision Srl), the analysis of camera-car videos from Formula 1 (Ferrari Gestione Sportiva Spa), application of medical imaging for the analysis of the cardiac frequency in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), in collaboration with the Burnham Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.

Andrea Prati is author or co-author of more than 140 papers in international journals and conference proceedings, he has been invited speaker, organizer of workshops and journal's special issues, reviewers for many international journals in the field of computer vision and multimedia. More specifically, he has acted as Program Chair of: 4th Workshop on Video Surveillance and Sensor Networks (VSSN), Santa Barbara (USA), 2006; 14th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing (ICIAP), Modena (Italy), 2007; ACM/IEEE International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras (ICDSC) for three editions (Ghent (Belgium) in 2011, Hong Kong in 2012, and Palm Springs, CA (USA) in 2013). He has served as General Chair of: 1st ACM International workshop on Vision Networks for Behavior Analysis (VNBA), Vancouver, BC (Canada), 2008; Workshop on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence for Human Behavior Analysis (PRAI4HBA), Reggio Emilia (Italy), 2009; Eigth ACM/IEEE International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras (ICDSC), Venice (Italy), 2014; 12th ACM International Conference on Distributed Smart Cameras (ICDSC), Eindhoven (the Netherlands), 2018.

He is a member of several editorial boards of international journals:
- From 2009 to 2011 member of the editorial board of the journal “Advances in Multimedia”, Hindawi Publishing
- From 2009 to 2017 member of the editorial board of the journal “International Journal of Multimedia Intelligence and Security (IJMIS)”, Inderscience publishers
- From 2009 to 2017 is associate editor of the SPIE journal Journal of Optical Engineering (http://spie.org/x867.xml)
- Starting 2011 member of the editorial board of the journal “Journal on Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments (JAISE)”, IOS Press (http://www.iospress.nl/journal/journal-of-ambient-intelligence-and-smart...)
- Starting 2013 he is Area Editor for video surveillance of the prestigious journal Computer Vision and Image Understanding of Elsevier (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/computer-vision-and-image-understanding/)
- Starting 2014 he is Associate Editor of EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing (JIVP) (http://jivp.eurasipjournals.com/about/edboard)
- Starting 2016 he is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT) (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8024132)
- Starting 2017 he is Section Editor-in-Chief for “Computer Science and Electrical Engineering” of MDPI journal “Applied Sciences” (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci/sectioneditors/computer_sci)

Andrea Prati is Senior Member of IEEE, member of ACM and member of GIRPR (IAPR Italy). In 2014 he has been awarded with the IAPR fellowship ”For contributions to low- and high-level algorithms for video surveillance”.