Toward Multimodal Human-Computer Interface

Recent advances in various signal-processing technologies, coupled with an explosion in the available computing power, have given rise to a number of novel human-computer interaction (HCI) modalities-speech, vision-based gesture recognition, eye tracking, electroencephalograph, etc. Successful embodiment of these modalities into an interface has the potential of easing the HCI bottleneck that has become noticeable with the advances in computing and communication. It has also become increasingly evident that the difficulties encountered in the analysis and interpretation of individual sensing modalities may be overcome by integrating them into a multimodal human-computer interface. In this paper, we examine several promising directions toward achieving multimodal HCI. We consider some of the emerging novel input modalities for HCI and the fundamental issues in integrating them at various levels-from early "signal" level to intermediate "feature " level to late "decision " level. We discuss the different computational approaches that may be applied at the different levels of modality integration. We also briefly review several demonstrated multimodal HCI systems and applications. Despite all the recent developments, it is clear that further research is needed for interpreting and fusing multiple sensing modalities in the context of HCI. This research can benefit from many disparate fields of study that increase our understanding of the different human communication modalities and their potential role in HCI.