A novel method for multi-sensory data fusion in multimodal human computer interaction

Multimodal User Interaction (MMUI) technology aims at building natural and intuitive interfaces allowing a user to interact with computer in a way similar to human-to-human communication, for example, through speech and gestures. As a critical component in MMUI, Multimodal Input Fusion explores ways to effectively interpret the combined semantic interpretation of user inputs through multiple modalities. This paper presents a novel approach to multi-sensory data fusion based on speech and manual deictic gesture inputs. The effectiveness of the technique has been validated through experiments, using a traffic incident management scenario where an operator interacts with a map on a large display at a distance and issues multimodal commands through speech and manual gestures. The description of the proposed approach and preliminary experiment results are presented.