Exploring Multimodal Input Fusion Strategies

Human-computer interaction is a discipline that aims at enabling the interaction between humans and computational machines. In the last years, several efforts have been made to make this interaction more intuitive and natural. In this direction, multimodal interaction has emerged as the future paradigm of human-computer interaction. In order to enable a natural dialogue between users and computer systems, in multimodal systems the two main challenges to face are: to combine and integrate information from different input modalities (fusion process) and to generate appropriate output information (fission process). Our specific concern in this chapter is with the fusion of multiple input modalities.