The Floor is an Image

The project aims at finding new solutions for sensing floors. The new system, similarly to a distribute sensor network, will be able to detect and to classify events due to human or object activities on the floor. Time and space dependent information provided by the network are real “floor images” and they can be processed using typical image processing techniques. Possible applications: e-health, retail monitoring, public place surveillance, and so on.

Following the same objective of hands-free devices, an innovative sensing floor called “Florimage device” has been developed during the project. The final solution si currently defined in an international Patent titled "Substrate for a sensitive floor and method for displaying loads on the substrate" (WO 2014141166 A1).

The smart floor  is able to capture and measure the pressure field exerted by people or objects on the tiles. Instead of optical images, the floor is able to generate a “pressure image”, where each pixel corresponds to a spatial portion of the floor and the pixel value is related to the pressure applied by people or object onto the floor itself. The technology we developed is modular and scalable.

This result is obtained adding a sensing layer below the ceramic tiles. The solution proposed is cheap enough to allow the coverage of wide areas and the sensing elements do not change the design or the appearance of the floor.

The proposed sensing floor allows a plethora of applications, spanning from entertainment to surveillance, from multimedia content access to medical rehabilitation.

Download a technical description of the sensing floor.

Three prototypes have been installed inside the Florim Ceramiche SpA showroom, at Imagelab laboratory and inside the MUST Museum in Lecce.. In addition, three portable platforms have been created to be presented on conferences and showrooms. 

The Florimage device has been presented at:

• MADE expo 2013
• StDays organised by St Microelectronics
• Medica 2013

Publications

1	Vezzani, Roberto; Lombardi, Martino; Pieracci, Augusto; Santinelli, Paolo; Cucchiara, Rita "A General-Purpose Sensing Floor Architecture for Human-Environment Interaction" ACM TRANSACTIONS ON INTERACTIVE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, vol. 5, pp. 1 -26 , 2015 | DOI: 10.1145/2751566 Journal
2	Vezzani, Roberto; Lombardi, Martino; Cucchiara, Rita "Automatic configuration and calibration of modular sensing floors" Proceedings of the 12th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal-Based Surveillance, Karlsruhe, Germany, pp. 1 -6 , 25-28 August 2015, 2015 | DOI: 10.1109/AVSS.2015.7301799 Conference
3	Lombardi, Martino; Vezzani, Roberto; Cucchiara, Rita "Detection of Human Movements with Pressure Floor Sensors" Image Analysis and Processing — ICIAP 2015, LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, vol. 9280, Genoa, Italy, pp. 620 -630 , 7-11 September 2015, 2015 | DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-23234-8_57 Conference
4	Lucchese, Claudio; Cucchiara, Rita; Lombardi, Martino; Pieracci, Augusto; Santinelli, Paolo; Vezzani, Roberto "Substrate for a sensitive floor and method for displaying loads on the substrate" 2014 Patent
5	Lombardi, Martino; Pieracci, Augusto; Santinelli, Paolo; Vezzani, Roberto; Cucchiara, Rita "Human Behavior Understanding with Wide Area Sensing Floors" Lecture Notes in Computer ScienceHuman Behavior Understanding, vol. 8212, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 112 -123 , 22 October 2013, 2013 | DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-02714-2_10 Conference
6	Lombardi, Martino; Pieracci, Augusto; Santinelli, Paolo; Vezzani, Roberto; Cucchiara, Rita "Sensing floors for privacy-compliant surveillance of wide areas" Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS), 2013 10th IEEE International Conference on, vol. 1, Krakow, Poland, pp. 105 -110 , 27-30 Aug. 2013, 2013 | DOI: 10.1109/AVSS.2013.6636624 Conference

Video Demo