IEEE ICPRS 2025

Drone Vision and Big data analytics for Natural Disaster Management

Natural Disaster Management (NDM, e.g., for wildfires, floods) can be greatly improved by automating precise semantic 3D mapping and disaster evolution prediction to achieve NDM goals in near-real-time. To this end, many heterogeneous extreme data sources must be analyzed and fused: smart drone and in-situ sensors, remote sensing data, topographical data, meteorological data/predictions and geosocial media data (text, image and videos). Drone vision is particularly important both for monitoring an NDM event and for assessing its impact. The lecture focus is on the extreme nature of the data, due to their varying resolution and quality, very large volume and update rate, different spatiotemporal resolutions and acquisition frequencies, real-time needs and multilingualism. Extreme data analytics can help developing an integrated, ground-breaking NDM platform, focusing on real-time semantic extraction from multiple heterogeneous data modalities and sources, on-the-fly construction of a meaningful semantically annotated 3D disaster area map, prediction of disaster evolution and improved communication between service providers and end-users, through automated process triggering and response recommendations. Semantic analysis computations will be distributed across the edge-to-cloud continuum, in a federated manner, to minimize latency. Extreme data analytics will be performed in a trustworthy and transparent way, by greatly advancing state-of-the-art AI and XAI approaches. The constantly updated 3D map and the disaster evolution predictions will form the basis for an advanced, interactive, Extended Reality (XR) interface, where the current situation will be visualized and different response strategies will be dynamically evaluated through simulation by NDM personnel. An innovative, scalable and efficient implementation platform will provide precise NDM support, based on extreme data analytics.

Ioannis Pitas (IEEE fellow, IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, EURASIP fellow) received the Diploma and PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece. From 1994 to date, he has been a Professor at the Department of Informatics of AUTH. He has been Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Information Analysis (AIIA) lab (1999-2025). He has served as a Visiting Professor at several Universities. He is Principal Researcher in AUTH and CERTH/ITI. His current interests are in the areas of computer vision, machine learning, autonomous systems, intelligent digital media, image/video processing, human-centred computing, affective computing, 3D imaging and biomedical imaging. He has published over 970 papers, contributed to 48 books in his areas of interest and edited or (co-)authored another 16 books. He has also been member of the program committee of many scientific conferences and workshops. In the past he served as Associate Editor or co-Editor of 23 international journals and General or Technical Chair of 5 international conferences. He delivered 151 keynote/invited speeches worldwide. He co-organized 38 conferences and participated in technical committees of 291 conferences. He participated in 75+ R&D projects, primarily funded by the European Union and is/was principal investigator in 47 such projects. He is the coordinator of the Horizon Europe R&D project TEMA ( https://tema-project.eu/). He is chair of the International AI Doctoral Academy (AIDA) https://www.i-aida.org/. He was chair and initiator of the IEEE Autonomous Systems Initiative https://ieeeasi.signalprocessingsociety.org/. He has 39160+ citations to his work and h-index 93. According to https://research.com/ he is ranked first in Greece and 319 worldwide in the field of Computer Science (2022).