Roberto Brunelli - senior researcher

R Brunelli photo Roberto Brunelli was born in Trento (Italy) in 1961. He received his degree (summa cum laude) in Physics from the University of Trento in 1986 with the thesis L'anomalia chirale abeliana nelle teorie quantistiche di campo (The Abelian Chiral Anomaly in Quantum Field Theories) under the supervision of Prof. Roberto Soldati. He joined ITC-irst in 1987 where he has been working in the Technologies of Vision team till 2009 when he joined Provincia Autonoma di Trento providing IT support to the local government.

In the past he was involved in research on: computer vision tools, analysis of aerial images, developement of algorithms working on compressed description of binary images, optimization, neural networks, face analysis, video analysis, image retrieval. He coordinated ITC-irst research efforts in several EU funded projects (EUROMEDIA, OPAL, PRIMAVERA and VIKEF) and performed didactical activity at the International Doctorate School of the University of Trento.

He has been acting as referee for some of the major journals on image processing and related techniques such as: Computer Vision and Image Understanding, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on PAMI, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition Letters. He served as a member of the Technical Committee of AVBPA, CVPR, ECCV and acted as reviewer for EU projects.

His professional interests included machine learning, vision, and computer graphics. You can find most of hist publications at ResearchGate and Google Scholar

I wrote a book on template matching techniques, a topic that represents the backbone of my research in computer vision. The book is published by Wiley. You can preview it using Google books and access supplementary pdf material at the Wiley book companion website, and code, data, and html material at the book companion website.

Template Matching Techniques in Computer Vision: Theory and Practice Template Matching Techniques in Computer Vision: Theory and Practice

The detection and recognition of objects in images is a key research topic in the computer vision community. Within this area, face recognition and interpretation has attracted increasing attention owing to the possibility of unveiling human perception mechanisms, and for the development of practical biometric systems. This book and the accompanying website, focus on template matching, a subset of object recognition techniques of wide applicability, which has proved to be particularly effective for face recognition applications. Using examples from face processing tasks throughout the book to illustrate more general object recognition approaches, Roberto Brunelli:
  • examines the basics of digital image formation, highlighting points critical to the task of template matching;
  • presents basic and advanced template matching techniques, targeting grey-level images, shapes and point sets;
  • discusses recent pattern classification paradigms from a template matching perspective;
  • illustrates the development of a real face recognition system;
  • explores the use of advanced computer graphics techniques in the development of computer vision algorithms.
Template Matching Techniques in Computer Vision is primarily aimed at practitioners working on the development of systems for effective object recognition such as biometrics, robot navigation, multimedia retrieval and landmark detection. It is also of interest to graduate students undertaking studies in these areas.


Roberto Brunelli
roby . brunelli (at) gmail . com