6th Multi-modal Learning and Applications Workshop (MULA)

The exploitation of the power of big data in the last few years led to a big step forward in many applications of Computer Vision. However, most of the tasks tackled so far are involving visual modality only, mainly due to the unbalanced number of labelled samples available among modalities (e.g., there are many huge labelled datasets for images while not as many for audio or IMU based classification), resulting in a huge gap in performance when algorithms are trained separately.

Recently, a few works have started to exploit the synchronization of multimodal streams (e.g., audio/video, RGB/depth, RGB/Lidar, visual/text, text/audio) to transfer semantic information from one modality to another reaching surprising results. Interesting applications are also proposed in a self-supervised fashion, where multiple modalities are learning correspondences without need of manual labelling, resulting in a more powerful set of features compared to those learned processing the two modalities separately. Other works have also shown that particular training paradigms allow neural networks to perform well when one of the modalities is missing due to sensor failure or unfavorable environmental conditions. These topics are gaining lots of interest in computer vision community in the recent years.

The information fusion from multiple sensors is a topic of major interest also in industry, the exponential growth of companies working on automotive, drone vision, surveillance or robotics are just a few examples. Many companies are trying to automate processes, by using a large variety of control signals from different sources. The aim of this workshop is to generate momentum around this topic of growing interest, and to encourage interdisciplinary interaction and collaboration between computer vision, multimedia, remote sensing, and robotics communities, that will serve as a forum for research groups from academia and industry.

We expect contributions involving, but not limited to, image, video, audio, depth, IR, IMU, laser, text, drawings, synthetic, etc. Position papers with feasibility studies and cross-modality issues with highly applicative flair are also encouraged. Multimodal data analysis is a very important bridge among vision, multimedia, remote sensing, and robotics, therefore we expect a positive response from these communities.