Hervé Bourlard - Böcker

Bringing together experts in multimodal signal processing, this book provides a detailed introduction to the area, with a focus on the analysis, recognition and interpretation of human communication. The technology described has powerful applications. For instance, automatic analysis of the outputs of cameras and microphones in a meeting can make sense of what is happening - who spoke, what they said, whether there was an active discussion and who was dominant in it. These analyses are layered to move from basic interpretations of the signals to richer semantic information. The book covers the necessary analyses in a tutorial manner, going from basic ideas to recent research results. It includes chapters on advanced speech processing and computer vision technologies, language understanding, interaction modeling and abstraction, as well as meeting support technology. This guide connects fundamental research with a wide range of prototype applications to support and analyze group interactions in meetings.

This book provides a synthesis of the multifaceted field of interactive multimodal information management. The subjects treated include spoken language processing, image and video processing, document and handwriting analysis, identity information and interfaces. The book concludes with an overview of the highlights of the progress of the field during the past ten years, as well as the problems that are now under investigation and that offer the most promising results for the future. The book is addressed to the graduate student/postdoc level, but much of the book will be accessible to all those with a general background in information processing.

This book contains a selection of refereed papers presented at the 1st Wo- shop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (MLMI 2004), held at the "Centre du Parc," Martigny, Switzerland, during June 21-23, 2004. The workshop was organized and sponsored jointly by three European projects, - AMI, Augmented Multiparty Interaction, http://www.amiproject.org - PASCAL, Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modeling and Computational Learning, http://www.pascal-network.org - M4, Multi-modal Meeting Manager, http://www.m4project.org as well as the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR): - IM2: Interactive Multimodal Information Management, http://www.im2.ch MLMI 2004 was thus sponsored by the European Commission and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Given the multiple links between the above projects and several related - search areas, it was decided to organize a joint workshop bringing together - searchers from the di?erent communities working around the common theme of advanced machine learning algorithms for processing and structuring mul- modal human interaction in meetings.The motivation for creating such a forum, which could be perceived as a number of papers from di?erent research dis- plines, evolved from a real need that arose from these projects and the strong motivation of their partners for such a multidisciplinary workshop. This asse- ment was indeed con?rmed by the success of this ?rst MLMI workshop, which attracted more than 200 participants.