INDIGO: Innovative Training and Decision Support for Emergency Operations

Details
Funded by: EU Seventh Framework Program	Reference: 242341
Start: 2010-05-03	Duration: 36 months
Partners
Coordinator: DIGINEXT	France
Contractor: CNR	Italy
Contractor: CRS4	Italy
Contractor: Immersion SAS	France
Contractor: European Committee for Standardization	Belgium
Contractor: CrisisPlan	The Netherlands
Contractor: Swedish National Defense College	Sweden
Contractor: Entente pour la foret mediterraneenne	France

Abstract

The INDIGO project aims to research, develop and validate an innovative system integrating the latest advances in Virtual Reality and Simulation in order to homogenise and enhance both the operational preparedness and the management of an actual complex crisis. INDIGO will enable: (a) the 3D interactive and realistic visualisation of the complete crisis environment, including data coming from the field, simulation results, and building interiors; (b) the creation and simulation of different evolving scenarios for planning, training, and anticipating future states and impending developments during operations, and analyse events after the crisis; (c) the simultaneous training of decision makers, crisis managers as well as first responders that will be influenced by the simulated scenario and that will reciprocally influence its evolution; (d) the involvement of multiple participants, thanks to its distributed architecture, while offering a unique pictorial way of sharing and communicating complex knowledge across organisation boundaries. In addition, INDIGO will propose a European emergency symbology reference for 2D/3D maps. This will fill an important gap by offering a common visual reference that can be used across Europe to facilitate the immediate understanding of the situation, thus improving decision making across organisational boundaries. The definition of the functional specifications of the system will be driven by the analysis of the needs of real end-users participating in the project as partners or involved in the User Group. These organisations will test and validate the outcomes of the project with real-world scenarios. By the end of the project a packaged system integrating all the proposed technologies will have been developed and provided to them under two versions for purpose of validation and refinement of needs and specifications. CRS4, together with ISTI-CNR, will concentrate on extending such a framework with the possibility of handling two particularly important data types: extremely massive point clouds, and geo-referenced (three-dimensionalized) photographs. These two particular datatypes are of particular importance to the security domain, since they can be acquired very rapidly and provide both measurable and visually recognizable description of a site. On the server side, the focus will be on the efficient handling of extremely massive data, on the incorporation of raw data (e.g., from LIDAR acquisitions), and on the efficient compressed streaming. Moreover, a combined (hybrid) solution using both 3D points and images will be researched.

Publications

	[1] Marcos Balsa Rodriguez, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Marton, Ruggero Pintus, Giovanni Pintore, and Alex Tinti. Interactive exploration of gigantic point clouds on mobile devices. In The 14th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. Pages 57-64, November 2012.
	[2] Giovanni Pintore, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Ganovelli, and Paolo Brivio. 3DNSITE: A networked interactive 3D visualization system to simplify location recognition in crisis management. In Proc. ACM Web3D International Symposium. Pages 59-67, August 2012. ACM Press. New York, NY, USA.
	[3] Jesse Himmelstein, Alexandre Ahmad, Olivier Balet, Jean-Baptiste de la Rivière, Maaike Schaap, Werner Overdijk, Enrico Gobbetti, Giovanni Pintore, Fabio Ganovelli, and Paolo Brivio. Interactive Simulation Technology for Crisis Management and Training: The INDIGO Project. In 9th International Conference for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM). Pages 144, April 2012.
	[4] Ruggero Pintus, Enrico Gobbetti, and Marco Agus. Real-time Rendering of Massive Unstructured Raw Point Clouds using Screen-space Operators. In The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. Pages 105-112, October 2011.
	[5] Ruggero Pintus, Enrico Gobbetti, and Roberto Combet. Fast and Robust Semi-Automatic Registration of Photographs to 3D Geometry. In The 12th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. Pages 9-16, October 2011.
	[6] Ruggero Pintus, Enrico Gobbetti, and Marco Callieri. Fast Low-Memory Seamless Photo Blending on Massive Point Clouds using a Streaming Framework. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 4(2): Article 6, 2011.
	[7] Ruggero Pintus, Enrico Gobbetti, and Marco Callieri. A Streaming Framework for Seamless Detailed Photo Blending on Massive Point Clouds. In Proc. Eurographics Area Papers. Pages 25-32, 2011.

Related videos

Giovanni Pintore, Enrico Gobbetti, Fabio Ganovelli, and Paolo Brivio 3DNSITE: A networked interactive 3D visualization system to simplify location recognition in crisis management CRS4 Video n. 165 - Date: August 2012 In Proc. ACM Web3D International Symposium. Pages 59-67, August 2012. ACM Press. New York, NY, USA.