We research the efficient, secure and reliable transmission of speech, image, video and other data sources over various communication channels, with special emphasis on mobile channels.
Our research areas include
We are also contributors to the Data Science Research Platform.
Research grants
cubesat for QUANtum and 5G cOmmunication (QUANGO)
The secure exchange of sensitive information is of crucial importance in our society, as it protects money transfer, commercial transactions, medical data, remote control of critical infrastructures (power grid, telecom etc.). On the security side, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a protocol based on the laws of quantum mechanics that guarantees unconditional security in the sharing of random keys to be used for secure communication. On the communication side, 5G is the fifth generation of wireless communication, that will soon become the standard for virtually every major telecommunication service provider, as defined by the standards organization 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). Both QKD and 5G technologies require a satellite network for a global coverage of their services. QUANGO will provide a new paradigm to share the satellite infrastructure required for secure communication based on quantum technologies and for 5G communication. The main objective of the project is the design of a network of 12U-CubeSat low-earth-orbit satellites offering combined capabilities for communication secured by QKD and for 5G connection for Internet of Things (IOT), the development of payloads, sub-systems and ground stations for such a network and its implementation feasibility. QUANGO is coordinated by the University of Padova, and the lead at University of Malta is André Xuereb.
Duration: 1-Jan-2021 to 31-Dec-2023
Grant: €2,127,655 (total), €200,000 (UM)
Funding source: Horizon 2020 SPACE-29-TEC-2020 programme
Grant Agreement: 101004341
Quantum key distribution is today the sole technology able to guarantee an absolutely secure solution for the cryptographic key exchange problem. Quantum key distribution, when implemented ideally, is guaranteed to be safe by the laws of quantum mechanics, and immune to eavesdropping. On the other hand, quantum key distribution is an immature, cutting-edge technology that is still being developed into a user-friendly, commercially-viable solution. This project aims to implement safe quantum communications technologies in real-world environments, by means of a prototypical quantum link between Italy and the island of Malta realised utilising an existing submarine telecommunication optical fibre link. SEQUEL is coordinated by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche (CNR), Italy, and the lead at University of Malta is André Xuereb.
Duration: Jul 2018—Dec 2021
Grant: €90,000 (UM)
Funding source: NATO Science for Peace and Security - Multi-Year Project
Grant Agreement: GA5485
The BIOBLU project is funded through the Interreg Italia-Malta European Regional Development Fund (total of €1,650,052) and will aim at mitigating the effects of plastic and microplaslic debris which litter our seas and beaches. Deep learning will be used to detect and localise litter remotely, which will enable automatic litter connection using a robot. Apart from aiding litter collection, the project will also provide useful information for biological studies on the different benthic and nektonic species, to understand the amount of pollution in different levels of the food chain, and above all to trace the origin of such pollution. The project is led by the Università degli Studi di Messina, and the University of Malta is one of the partners in the project.
Duration: 2021-2023
Grant: €1,650,052
Coastal erosion is an unrelenting phenomenon which is of importance to the Maltese Islands as the coast is one of the most-intensely used and visited areas. Research in the downstream Earth Observation sector is key to achieving reliable and cost-effective monitoring of coastal erosion. Persistent Scatterer Interferometry (PSI) techniques utilize Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) onboard satellites to provide millimetric deformation estimates. However, SAR suffers from speckle noise, which can affect the PSI processing pipeline and the resulting deformation maps and their interpretation. The “Coastal Satellite Assisted Governance (tools, techniques, models) for Erosion” (Coastal SAGE) project will use image processing and deep learning techniques to address two key aspects of the PSI pipeline: denoising of interferometric phase and phase unwrapping. The developed denoising and unwrapping methods will be used to extract ground displacements from time series of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) acquisitions, in order to estimate deformation and displacement in study areas around Malta and Gozo. These estimates will be validated through in-situ sensors. The Coastal SAGE project is led by Dr Ing. Gianluca Valentino from the University of Malta, with the Marine and Storm Water Unit of the Public Works Department within the Ministry of Transport, Infrastructure and Capital Projects as a partner within the consortium, led by Dr George Buhagiar.
Duration: 2020-2022
Grant: €150,000
Malta has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate with a low availability of natural renewable water resources for sustaining the production of drinking water, the water demand of agriculture and the sustainability of the environment. This coupled to a high population density exerts a significant pressure on natural water resources and associated ecosystems. The overall objective of the WARM-EO project is to develop a Water Resource Management platform that can be used to estimate irrigation water consumption of particular crops at country level. Nevertheless, models adopted in other countries are not applicable to small Mediterranean countries such as Malta where the parcels are too small and fragmented for the resolution of existing open-access satellite services. The WARM-EO project aims to develop a cost-effective high-resolution evapotranspiration model to estimate the irrigation water use at parcel level. More specifically, the project aims to develop a deep-learning based multi-frame superresolution algorithm to improve the resolution of Sentinel-2 optical images to enable the computation of vegetation indices at 3 m resolution. Moreover, this project intends to fuse in-situ data obtained from nine farms scattered around the island and remote sensing data to estimate land surface temperature at parcel level. The resulting high-resolution evapotranspiration model will be validated against ground-truth evapotranspiration measurements provided by the Energy and Water Agency as part of the CF.PA 10.0096 Project. A Web-GIS service will also be developed to estimate the evapotranspiration of the whole country.
Duration: 2020-2022
Grant: €150,000
Duration: 2019-2022
Grant: €200,000
The state-of-the-art in augmented-reality (AR), virtual-reality (VR) and cinematic recording is the Lytro Immerge 2.0, using a rig of ninety-five (95) cameras. This technology allows digital refocusing after capture and facilitates 3D modelling and the realistic integration of computer-generated content. The major hurdle is that this system is too expensive for most productions. The VoLARe project involves the design and development of a low-cost video light field capturing prototype which aims to reduce the number of cameras by a factor of nine (9) thus reducing the throughput down to 30 Gbps. The major challenge in this project is to develop spatial, angular and temporal restoration techniques to improve the quality of the captured video light field.
Duration: 2018–2021
Grant: €200,000
Funding source: FUSION R&I Technology Development Programme
The Deep-FIR project aims to design and implement a face image restoration algorithm that is able to restore very low-resolution facial images captured by CCTV systems with unconstrained pose and orientation. Apart from improving the quality of the restored facial images, this project intends to reduce the complexity, and therefore the time needed to enhance an image or video frame. The developed algorithm will be tested on real-world CCTV videos and compared against existing video forensic tools used by forensic experts in their labs. Project Deep-FIR financed by the Malta Council of Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation of Science and Technology, through the FUSION: R&I Technology Development Programme.
The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN studies the quark gluon plasma thought to have existed at the start of the Big Bang. Due to the high interaction rate in the experiment resulting from the collisions of heavy-ion particles, particle tracks produced in ALICE's detectors are often characterised by high occupancy and high noise. Members of the Data Science Research Group (DSRG) collaborate with two such detectors. In the case of the Time Projection Chamber, the objective is to identify low-momentum (low radius) helices which are not useful for physics analyses. On the other hand, in the High Momentum Particle IDentification detector, the aim is to identify elliptical patters from which the Cherenkov angle can be calculated.
SAtellite TraIning and NETworking (SATINET)
Duration: 2019-2020
Grant: €50,000
The Pléiades satellite is the first satellite that captures three consecutive high resolution images of the same region within a relatively short time-frame. This enables researchers to use computer vision techniques to estimate the elevation of objects from the land surface. Researchers at CNES have developed a processing pipeline that is able to generate a 3D reconstruction of scenes captured by the Pléiades satellite. This technology makes it possible to update the digital elevation models on a daily basis. Nevertheless, the 3D reconstruction method has an inherent error margin and can also introduce distortions in the models. The aim of the SATINET project is to use images captured by Synthetic Aperture Radar from Sentinel-1 and adopt more advanced computer vision techniques to improve the quality of the existing 3D reconstruction model. This project will also finance an M.Sc. by research project in collaboration with CNES within the Department of Communications and Computer Engineering at the University of Malta to work on Crop classification.
Duration: 2019–2020
Grant: €100,000
Funding source: ATTRACT project
Microtomography is an X-ray imaging technique similar to the medical CT scanner, and can be used to visualize the internal structures of objects in a non-invasive and non-destructive way. However, microtomography uses synchrotron radiation, an extremely powerful source of X-rays. This allows scans at much higher resolution and quality. Thanks to the phase contrast effect, it can also be used to image soft tissues without the need for contrast agents. Our partners on this project at ESRF have been using two of the microtomography beamlines (ID19 and BM05) for applications in Egyptology, through the investigation of animal mummies. In this application, trained specialists manually segment the volume into textiles, organic tissues, balm resin, ceramics and bones. This process is very time consuming, typically taking several weeks for a small animal mummy. In the near future, thanks to the construction of a new beamline (BM18), the same process is expected to be applied to human mummies, which would take considerably longer. The main objective of our project is to develop and use artificial intelligence techniques to automatically perform this laborious process. Following the principles of “Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World”, the developed algorithms, data sets, and results will be made available to the general public. This project has received funding from the ATTRACT project funded by the EC under Grant Agreement 777222.
Duration: 2018–2020
Grant: €150,000
Funding source: Space Research Fund programme
The main objectives of the SAT-FIRE project is to improve the spatial resolution challenges of the current Earth Observation (EO) Satellite systems by fusing complementary data from different spatial images from Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data to improve both spatial and temporal resolution and quality of satellite images. This will allow for more accurate predictions of marine currents, aiding divers, search and rescue operations and coastal monitoring. This is an interdisciplinary research project which lies at the intersection of satellite image processing, remote sensing, data fusion and hydro-dynamical modelling. This project is financed by the Space Research Fund programme of the Malta Council of Science and Technology and is supported by the European Space Agency (ESA).
A Network of Assistive Technology for an Independent and Functional Life (NETIFLife)
Duration: May 2018–2020
Grant: €225,224
Funding source: Interreg Italia-Malta
The main objective of the project is the development of an innovative framework of assistive technology by a joint action between research, industrial, institutional and social sectors. Moreover, the project will reinforce two research centres, one at the University of Catania and the other at the University of Malta, with new equipment. Research will be carried out to develop disruptive solutions in the the area of assistive technologies representing a reference for enterprises.
Duration: September 2016–2019
Grant: €44,457
Funding source: Erasmus+
The main objective of this project is to offer a multidisciplinary programme for skills development, involving principles from Informatics and Internet technologies, Telecommunications and Network engineering, Social Media sciences and Security. Towards this direction, NEREUS elaborates on cutting-edge topics that are of major importance for societal, cultural and economic prosperity, and with strategic impact in Europe’s 2020 Agenda for sustainable growth and competitiveness both at national and regional levels, focusing onto:
In this context, NEREUS aims to develop/offer educational material to final year Bachelor and 1st year M.Sc. students in the form of 5 courses and test/evaluate them through intensive courses (one week duration each), which will be summarised in a whole module of 10 ECTS.
High Intensity Radiated Field Synthetic Environment (HIRF SE)
Funding: EUR 152,272 (EUR 118,308 from EC)
Duration: 4 years
Funding source: EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7)
Start date: December 2008
The HIRF Synthetic Environment research project has the goal to provide to the aeronautic industry a numerical modelling computer framework which can be used during the development phase (including upgrade), in order to ensure adequate EM performance, but also in addition and in a considerable reduction to certification/qualification testing phase on air vehicle.
The multimedia research group led by Dr Saviour Zammit received a research grant of Lm 11,500 (EUR 26,788) to research Digital Video Conferencing Systems.
Dr Paul Micallef received Lm 2000 (EUR 4659) to do research in speech synthesis.