The activity that led to this thesis is developed as part of the NFFA-EUROPE project and is funded by CNR-IOM. In the following we briefly describe this context and the scientific problems that have been faced in the past within the project. This chapter is organized as follows: we first introduce the NFFA-EUROPE project and then discuss the main tool used to implement the classification service, convolutional neural networks. Finally we give an overview of the rest of the thesis.