Abstract Classification using multimodal data arises in many machine learning applications. It is crucial not only to model cross-modal relationship effectively but also to ensure robustness against loss of part of data or modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based multimodal fusion architecture for classification tasks, which guarantees compatibility with any kind of learning models, deals with cross-modal information carefully, and prevents performance degradation due to partial absence of data. We employ two datasets for multimodal classification tasks, build models based on our architecture and other state-of-the-art models, and analyze their performance on various situations. The results show that our architecture outperforms the other multimodal fusion architectures when some parts of data are not available.
Most of the existing approaches of multimodal 2D+3D face recognition exploit the 2D and 3D information at the feature or score level. They do not fully benefit from the dependency between modalities. Exploiting this dependency at the early stage is more effective than the later stage. Early fusion data contains richer information about the input biometric than the compressed features or matching scores. We propose an image recombination for face recognition that explores the dependency between modalities at the image level. Facial cues from the 2D and 3D images are recombined into a more independent and discriminating data by finding transformation axes that account for the maximal amount of variances in the images. We also introduce a complete framework of multimodal 2D+3D face recognition that utilizes the 2D and 3D facial information at the enrollment, image and score levels. Experimental results based on NTU-CSP and Bosphorus 3D face databases show that our face recognition system using image recombination outperforms other face recognition systems based on the pixel- or score-level fusion. Abstract This paper advocates that for some multimodal tasks involving more than one stream of data representing the same sequence of events, it might sometimes be a good idea to be able to desynchronize the streams in order to maximize their joint likelihood. We thus present a novel Hidden Markov Model architecture to model the joint probability of pairs of asynchronous sequences describing the same sequence of events. An Expectation–Maximization algorithm to train the model is presented, as well as a Viterbi decoding algorithm, which can be used to obtain the optimal state sequence as well as the alignment between the two sequences. The model was tested on two audio–visual speech processing tasks, namely speech recognition and text-dependent speaker verification, both using the M2VTS database. Robust performances under various noise conditions were obtained in both cases. This paper proposes a new method for bimodal information fusion in audio-visual speech recognition, where cross-modal association is considered in two levels. First, the acoustic and the visual data streams are combined at the feature level by using the canonical correlation analysis, which deals with the problems of audio-visual synchronization and utilizing the cross-modal correlation. Second, information streams are integrated at the decision level for adaptive fusion of the streams according to the noise condition of the given speech datum. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for producing noise-robust recognition performance without a priori knowledge about the noise conditions of the speech data. Multimodal biometrics has recently attracted substantial interest for its high performance in biometric recognition system. In this paper we introduce multimodal biometrics for face and palmprint images using fusion techniques at the feature level. Gabor based image processing is utilized to extract discriminant features, while principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are used to reduce the dimension of each modality. The output features of LDA are serially combined and classified by a Euclidean distance classifier. The experimental results based on ORL face and Poly-U palmprint databases proved that this fusion technique is able to increase biometric recognition rates compared to that produced by single modal biometrics. Semantic analysis of multimodal video aims to index segments of interest at a conceptual level. In reaching this goal, it requires an analysis of several information streams. At some point in the analysis these streams need to be fused. In this paper, we consider two classes of fusion schemes, namely early fusion and late fusion. The former fuses modalities in feature space, the latter fuses modalities in semantic space. We show by experiment on 184 hours of broadcast video data and for 20 semantic concepts, that late fusion tends to give slightly better performance for most concepts. However, for those concepts where early fusion performs better the difference is more significant.