Multi-level fusion of hard and soft information

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.Driven by the underlying need for a yet to be developed framework for fusing heterogeneous data and information at different semantic levels coming from both sensory and human sources, we present some results of the research being conducted within the NATO Research Task Group IST-106/RTG-051 on "Information Filtering and Multi Source Information Fusion". As part of this on-going effort, we discuss here a first outcome of our investigation on multi-level fusion. It deals with removing the first hurdle between data/information sources and processes being at different levels: representation. Our contention here is that a common representation and description framework is the premise for enabling processing overarching different semantic levels. To this end we discuss here the use of the Battle Management Language (BML) as a way ("lingua franca") to encode sensory data, a priori and contextual knowledge, both as hard and soft data.Publicad

Navigation capabilities of mid-cost GNSS/INS vs. smartphone analysis and comparison in urban navigation scenarios

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.High accuracy navigation usually require expensive sensors and/or its careful integration into a complex and finely tuned system. Smartphones pack a high number of sensors in a portable format, becoming a source of low-quality information with a high heterogeneity and redundancy. This work compares pure GNSS/INS capabilities on both types of platform, and discuss the weaknesses/opportunities offered by the smartphone. The analysis is carried out in a modular context-aware sensor fusion architecture developed for a previous work. It intends to serve as a preparation for answering bigger questions: can smartphones provide robust and high-quality navigation in vehicles? In which conditions? Where are the limits in the different navigation scenarios?This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485)Publicad

Processing and fusioning multiple heterogeneous information sources in multimodal dialog systems

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.Context-aware dialog systems must be able to process very heterogeneous information sources and user input modes. In this paper we propose a method to fuse multimodal inputs into a unified representation. This representation allows the dialog manager of the system to find the best interaction strategy and also select the next system response. We show the applicability of our proposal by means of the implementation of a dialog system that considers spoken, tactile, and also information related to the context of the interaction with its users. Context information is related to the detection of user's intention during the dialog and their emotional state (internal context), and the user's location (external context).This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485).Publicad

Truncated Moment Problem for Dirac Mixture Densities with Entropy Regularization

We assume that a finite set of moments of a random vector is given. Its underlying density is unknown. An algorithm is proposed for efficiently calculating Dirac mixture densities maintaining these moments while providing a homogeneous coverage of the state space.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure

Geographic context configuration in fusion algorithms for maritime surveillance

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.Real fusion system applications can be required to operate on wide areas for long periods of time. Adaptation is a basic capability under these circumstances. This paper presents a maritime surveillance platform designed to be flexible and robust. It features online configuration capabilities allowing to: (a) change the applied algorithms, (b) modify the operating parameters of the running algorithms, (c) tune the characterization of the available sensors. These configurations can be applied to limited spatial regions and time spans. This allows to use powerful or more specific configurations for localized scenarios (risks, clutter, alarms), or account for exceptional situations that can affect sensors, such as weather anomalies.This work was funded by contract between DEIMOS SPACE, S.L.U. and Universidad Carlos III, by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grants TEC2012- 37832-C02-01, TEC2011-28626-C02-02, and by Madrid Region Gov., grant CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485).Publicad

A novel approach for data fusion and dialog management in user-adapted multimodal dialog systems

Proceedings of: 17th International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION 2014): Salamanca, Spain 7-10 July 2014.Multimodal dialog systems have demonstrated a high potential for more flexible, usable and natural humancomputer interaction. These improvements are highly dependent on the fusion and dialog management processes, which respectively integrates and interprets multimedia multimodal information and decides the next system response for the current dialog state. In this paper we propose to carry out the multimodal fusion and dialog management processes at the dialog level in a single step. To do this, we describe an approach based on a statistical model that takes user's intention into account, generates a single representation obtained from the different input modalities and their confidence scores, and selects the next system action based on this representation. The paper also describes the practical application of the proposed approach to develop a multimodal dialog system providing travel and tourist information.This work was supported in part by Projects MINECO TEC2012-37832-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485).Publicad