A New Approach Based on Computer Vision and Collaborative Social Networking for Environmental Preservation: Theory, Tools and Results of Italian ACI Project

摘要

The ACI project (from the Italian acronym Antropentropia Comuni Italiani, i.e., Italian Municipality Anthropentropy) is a collaborative social media based project whose main goal is to measure the impact of invasive presence of human settlements on the environment. The novelty of this approach is to propose a new indicator, which considers not only the area of regions which are occupied by human settlements (buildings, roads, recreational areas), but also their relative shape and contiguity, in order to include in the metric the negative effect of territory fragmentation. Land use and fragmentation is expressed by the Anthropentropy Factor (AF); it is computed by classical computer vision operators (morphological dilation). The paper describes the theory of the new metric, its application to the Italian territory and the involvement of social network and crowdsourcing for generating open data on the current state of land use. One of the aims of this contribution is to show how well known computer vision algorithms, applied to open data collected by the User Generated Content paradigm, can be useful to map the state of degradation of the Italian territory.