In mulsemedia applications, traditional media content (text, image, audio, video, etc.) can be related to media objects that target other human senses (e.g., smell, haptics, taste). Such applications aim at bridging the virtual and real worlds through sensors and actuators. Actuators are responsible for the execution of sensory effects (e.g., wind, heat, light), which produce sensory stimulations on the users. In these applications sensory stimulation must happen in a timely manner regarding the other traditional media content being presented. For example, at the moment in which an explosion is presented in the audiovisual content, it may be adequate to activate actuators that produce heat and light. It is common to use some declarative multimedia authoring language to relate the timestamp in which each media object is to be presented to the execution of some sensory effect. One problem in this setting is that the synchronization of media objects and sensory effects is done manually by the author(s) of the application, a process which is time-consuming and error prone. In this paper, we present a bimodal neural network architecture to assist the synchronization task in mulsemedia applications. Our approach is based on the idea that audio and video signals can be used simultaneously to identify the timestamps in which some sensory effect should be executed. Our learning architecture combines audio and video signals for the prediction of scene components. For evaluation purposes, we construct a dataset based on Google's AudioSet. We provide experiments to validate our bimodal architecture. Our results show that the bimodal approach produces better results when compared to several variants of unimodal architectures.
Protection of data integrity and person identity has been an active research area for many years. Among the techniques investigated, developing multi-modal recognition systems using audio and face signals for people authentication holds a promising future due to its ease of use. A challenge in developing such a multi-modal recognition system is to improve its reliability for a practical application. In this paper, an efficient audio-visual bimodal recognition system which uses Deep Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) as a primary model architecture. First, two separate Deep CNN models are trained with the help of audio and facial features, respectively. The outputs of these CNN models are then combined fused to predict the identity of the subject. Implementation details with regard to data fusion are discussed in a great length in the paper. Through experimental verification, the proposed bimodal fusion approach is superior in accuracy performance when compared with any single modal recognition systems and with published results using the same data-set.