Francesco Ioli

I’m Francesco Ioli, a PhD student in Geoinformatics at Politecnico di Milano, specializing in computer vision and remote sensing. I graduated in Environmental and Land Planning Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in 2019, with a major in Remote Sensing.

My research is focused on photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction, particularly in challenging scenarios such as alpine glacier monitoring. Currently, I’m working on a low-cost image-based system called ICEpy4D for 4D glacier monitoring, which has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of glacier dynamics.

I’m passionate about coding and technology. I’m always trying to explore new innovative solutions using the most recent advantages in Deep Learning techniques, mostly for image matching and 3D reconstruction from images.

I am a firm believer in open-source principles, advocating for the accessibility of software, data, and scientific knowledge. I am trying my best to code well and share all my work and code on GitHub in such a way that it can be easily used and understood by others.

Currently, together with Luca Morelli (3DOM - FBK), I am developing a Python toolbox called Deep-Image-Matching, a multi-view image matching toolbox that integrates traditional and hand-crafted and state-of-the-art deep-learning feature matching algorithms. This toolbox is aimed at simplifying feature matching in complex scenarios where traditional SIFT-like approaches fail, such as strong viewpoints changes and wide camera baselines. The matched features are ready for SfM and they can be imported into COLMAP, Agisoft Metashape, and MicMac for 3D reconstruction.

I am a UAV pilot with a strong background in topography, I’m constantly exploring new avenues to advance UAV-based and terrestrial photogrammetry for applications such as land and infrastructure monitoring.

Beyond academia, I like everything it is connected with mountains and nature, from hiking to climbing, mountaineering and skiing. I’m also a big fan of photography and this is probably why I love to work with images make 3D models out of them. Not surprisingly, I like glaciers, snow and cold places. I enjoyed Erasmus in Helsinki and my internship for the master thesis in Zurich, where I had the chance to live and work in very international environments.

Feel free to explore my projects and research further on this website and contect me.

Interests: computer vision, photogrammetry, 3D reconstruction, image matching, deep learning, terrestrial time-lapse camera, UAVs, point clouds, Lidar, Arduino and Raspberry, glacier dynamics, topography, open-source software.