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Gianpiero Francesca

Gianpiero Francesca contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Language-Based Swarm Perception: Decentralized Person Re-Identification via Natural Language Descriptions

We introduce a method for decentralized person re-identification in robot swarms that leverages natural language as the primary representational modality. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on opaque visual embeddings -- high-dimensional feature vectors extracted from images -- the proposed method uses human-readable language to represent observations. Each robot locally detects and describes individuals using a vision-language model (VLM), producing textual descriptions of appearance instead of feature vectors. These descriptions are compared and clustered across the swarm without centralized coordination, allowing robots to collaboratively group observations of the same individual. Each cluster is distilled into a representative description by a language model, providing an interpretable, concise summary of the swarm's collective perception. This approach enables natural-language querying, enhances transparency, and supports explainable swarm behavior. Preliminary experiments demonstrate competitive performance in identity consistency and interpretability compared to embedding-based methods, despite current limitations in text similarity and computational load. Ongoing work explores refined similarity metrics, semantic navigation, and the extension of language-based perception to environmental elements. This work prioritizes decentralized perception and communication, while active navigation remains an open direction for future study.

preprint2026arXiv

SnapPose3D: Diffusion-Based Single-Frame 2D-to-3D Lifting of Human Poses

Depth ambiguity and joint uncertainty are the two main obstacles in obtaining accurate human pose predictions by 2D-to-3D lifting methods proposed in the literature. In particular, these issues are caused by 2D joint locations that can be mapped to multiple 3D positions, inducing multiple possible final poses. Following these considerations, we propose leveraging diffusion-based models generation capability to predict multiple hypotheses and aggregate them in a final accurate pose. Therefore, we introduce SnapPose3D, a pose-lifting framework trained deterministically to denoise 3D poses conditioned on both visual context and 2D pose features. SnapPose3D adopts a probabilistic approach during inference, generating multiple hypotheses through random sampling from a unit Gaussian distribution. Unlike most previous methods that address pose ambiguity by processing temporal sequences, SnapPose3D uses single frames as input, avoiding tracking and limiting computational cost, data acquisition complexity, and the need for online, real-time applications. We extensively evaluate SnapPose3D on well-known benchmarks for the 3D human pose estimation task showing its ability to generate and aggregate accurate hypotheses that lead to state-of-the-art results.

preprint2023arXiv

Human-Scene Network: A Novel Baseline with Self-rectifying Loss for Weakly supervised Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection in surveillance systems with only video-level labels (i.e. weakly-supervised) is challenging. This is due to, (i) the complex integration of human and scene based anomalies comprising of subtle and sharp spatio-temporal cues in real-world scenarios, (ii) non-optimal optimization between normal and anomaly instances under weak supervision. In this paper, we propose a Human-Scene Network to learn discriminative representations by capturing both subtle and strong cues in a dissociative manner. In addition, a self-rectifying loss is also proposed that dynamically computes the pseudo temporal annotations from video-level labels for optimizing the Human-Scene Network effectively. The proposed Human-Scene Network optimized with self-rectifying loss is validated on three publicly available datasets i.e. UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech and IITB-Corridor, outperforming recently reported state-of-the-art approaches on five out of the six scenarios considered.

preprint2022arXiv

Toyota Smarthome Untrimmed: Real-World Untrimmed Videos for Activity Detection

Designing activity detection systems that can be successfully deployed in daily-living environments requires datasets that pose the challenges typical of real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a new untrimmed daily-living dataset that features several real-world challenges: Toyota Smarthome Untrimmed (TSU). TSU contains a wide variety of activities performed in a spontaneous manner. The dataset contains dense annotations including elementary, composite activities and activities involving interactions with objects. We provide an analysis of the real-world challenges featured by our dataset, highlighting the open issues for detection algorithms. We show that current state-of-the-art methods fail to achieve satisfactory performance on the TSU dataset. Therefore, we propose a new baseline method for activity detection to tackle the novel challenges provided by our dataset. This method leverages one modality (i.e. optic flow) to generate the attention weights to guide another modality (i.e RGB) to better detect the activity boundaries. This is particularly beneficial to detect activities characterized by high temporal variance. We show that the method we propose outperforms state-of-the-art methods on TSU and on another popular challenging dataset, Charades.

preprint2022arXiv

ViA: View-invariant Skeleton Action Representation Learning via Motion Retargeting

Current self-supervised approaches for skeleton action representation learning often focus on constrained scenarios, where videos and skeleton data are recorded in laboratory settings. When dealing with estimated skeleton data in real-world videos, such methods perform poorly due to the large variations across subjects and camera viewpoints. To address this issue, we introduce ViA, a novel View-Invariant Autoencoder for self-supervised skeleton action representation learning. ViA leverages motion retargeting between different human performers as a pretext task, in order to disentangle the latent action-specific `Motion' features on top of the visual representation of a 2D or 3D skeleton sequence. Such `Motion' features are invariant to skeleton geometry and camera view and allow ViA to facilitate both, cross-subject and cross-view action classification tasks. We conduct a study focusing on transfer-learning for skeleton-based action recognition with self-supervised pre-training on real-world data (e.g., Posetics). Our results showcase that skeleton representations learned from ViA are generic enough to improve upon state-of-the-art action classification accuracy, not only on 3D laboratory datasets such as NTU-RGB+D 60 and NTU-RGB+D 120, but also on real-world datasets where only 2D data are accurately estimated, e.g., Toyota Smarthome, UAV-Human and Penn Action.