The Italian National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)
The Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione (ISTI) is located in Pisa in the Consiglio Nazionale
delle Ricerche (CNR) Research Campus. Most of its scientific activity is performed within the framework of
national and international research projects. CNR-ISTI is also responsible for teaching (Master or PhD level)
and technology transfer activities, with collaborations currently under way with both Italian and foreign
industrial partners.
The Visual Computing Laboratory (VClab), one of the research departments of CNR-ISTI,
has been active on visualisation and computer graphics since 1984 and nowadays is composed of 21
researchers. Its research is devoted to computer graphics, with focus on algorithms and data structures for
visualisation, algorithms for efficient interactive 3D graphics of bug data on PC/web/mobile platforms, 3D
scanning and automatic acquisition from images. VClab is engaged in several projects concerning 3D
graphics applied to environment reconstruction, in particular it is part of the EU NoE "V-MUST.Net" network
and it has been partner of EU IST IP "3DCOFORM" and several other EC projects.
In the Security domain, CNR-ISTI has participated in EC PASR-2004 "CRIMSON: Crisis Simulation System”
and EC FP7 Security "INDIGO: Innovative Training and Decision Support for Emergency Operations" where
it was in charge of the geo-localisation of pictures taken from the field.
CNR-ISTI plays a leading role on large terrain and urban dataset visualization, producing state of the art
solutions published in tiers-one international conference proceedings (SIGGRAPH, Eurographics, etc.) and
journals (IEEE TVCG, etc.), developed in the context of The V-Planet FP6 project and the V-City FP7
project. Another recognized leadership is in sampled-based 3D reconstruction technologies, where CNR-ISTI
has developed the highly successful open source system MeshLab (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/) and is
recognized as one of the major players in 3D scanning and processing of 3D sampled data.
More information is available at http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/