VASCO: A Virtual Studio for Security Concepts and Operations

Details
Funded by: EU Seventh Framework Program	Reference: 607737
Start: 2014-03-01	Duration: 36 months
Partners
Coordinator: DIGINEXT	France
Contractor: CNR	Italy
Contractor: CRS4	Italy
Contractor: Immersion SAS	France
Contractor: Center for Security Studies	Greece
Contractor: CrisisPlan	The Netherlands
Contractor: Swedish National Defense College	Sweden

Abstract

The concentration of government buildings within urban environments has become a source of serious security vulnerability. Administrators and security experts face a variety of evolving threats that are hard to anticipate. To secure a government building against multiple threats while maintaining a minimal level of transparency and accessibility requires an integral security approach. It demands interdisciplinary collaboration between different experts from different domains. Currently, there is no efficient method or tool that allows the experts of different stripes to efficiently design, evaluate and implement appropriate security concepts. Existing ones do not allow for the effective creation, analysis, assessment, and sharing of security concepts that will help government administrators provide a secure environment for personnel and citizens.The VASCO project addresses two important objectives. First, it will design, implement and evaluate an innovative IT tool that will enable security professionals and administrators to jointly formulate, test, and adjust security concepts and measures in a virtual environment. This provides a cost-effective and risk- free environment in which to devise an evidence-based, all-risk approach for the protection of government buildings. Second, it will produce a knowledge and best practice database, which captures dynamic and visual reference scenarios created with the VASCO system. To accomplish these aims, the project will adopt an iterative methodology that enables the constant involvement of its world-class security and crisis management experts, assisted by a solid and open user group, during the whole project. It makes use of the latest advances in interactive visualisation, simulation, crisis management, and artificial intelligence to provide end-users with an unprecedented tool that dramatically improves the way in which they collaborate to secure critical government assets both at home and abroad. CRS4, together with ISTI-CNR, will concentrate on techniques for acquisition and exploration of indoor environments.

Publications

	[1] Giovanni Pintore, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, and Roberto Scopigno. Mobile reconstruction and exploration of indoor structures exploiting omnidirectional images. In Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia Mobile Graphics and Interactive Applications. Pages 1:1-1:4, December 2016. DOI: 10.1145/2999508.2999526.
	[2] Valeria Garro, Giovanni Pintore, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, and Roberto Scopigno. Fast Metric Acquisition with Mobile Devices. In Proc. 21st International Workshop on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV). Pages 29-36, October 2016. DOI: 10.2312/vmv.20161339.
	[3] Giovanni Pintore, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, and Roberto Scopigno. Mobile Mapping and Visualization of Indoor Structures to Simplify Scene Understanding and Location Awareness. In Computer Vision - ECCV 2016 Workshops: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 8-10 and 15-16, 2016, Proceedings, Part II. Pages 130-145, October 2016. Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-48881-3_10.
	[4] Alexandre Ahmad, Olivier Balet, Arjen Boin, Julien Castet, Maureen Donnelley, Fabio Ganovelli, George Kokkinis, and Giovanni Pintore. Assessing the Security of Buildings: A Virtual Studio Solution. In 13th International Conference for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM), May 2016.
	[5] Giovanni Pintore, Valeria Garro, Fabio Ganovelli, Enrico Gobbetti, and Marco Agus. Omnidirectional image capture on mobile devices for fast automatic generation of 2.5D indoor maps. In Proc. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). Pages 1-9, February 2016. DOI: 10.1109/WACV.2016.7477631.
	[6] Giovanni Pintore, Marco Agus, and Enrico Gobbetti. Interactive mapping of indoor building structures through mobile devices. In Proc. 2nd International Conference on 3D Vision. Volume 2. Pages 103-110, December 2014. DOI: 10.1109/3DV.2014.40.
	[7] Arjen Boin, Frederik Bynander, Giovanni Pintore, Fabio Ganovelli, George Leventakis, Alexandre Ahmad, and Olivier Balet. Building an IT Platform for Strategic Crisis Management Preparation. In 10th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob). Pages 20-27, October 2014. DOI: 10.1109/WiMOB.2014.6962144.
	[8] Giovanni Pintore and Enrico Gobbetti. Effective Mobile Mapping of Multi-room Indoor Structures. The Visual Computer, 30(6--8): 707-716, 2014.
	[9] Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, Marcos Balsa Rodriguez, Alberto Jaspe Villanueva, Roberto Scopigno, and Enrico Gobbetti. ExploreMaps: Efficient Construction and Ubiquitous Exploration of Panoramic View Graphs of Complex 3D Environments. Computer Graphics Forum, 33(2): 459-468, 2014. DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12334. Proc. Eurographics 2014.

Related videos

Marco Di Benedetto, Fabio Ganovelli, Marcos Balsa Rodriguez, Alberto Jaspe Villanueva, Roberto Scopigno, and Enrico Gobbetti ExploreMaps: Efficient Construction and Ubiquitous Exploration of Panoramic View Graphs of Complex 3D Environments. CRS4 Video n. 170 - Date: April 2014 Computer Graphics Forum, 33(2): 459-468, 2014. Proc. Eurographics 2014