
Chapter 1
Introduc tion
Jean-Philippe Thiran
∗
, Ferran Marqués
†
, and Hervé Bourlard
∗∗
∗
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland;
†
Universitat Politècnica
de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;
∗∗
Idiap Research Institute and EPFL,
Switzerland
Amultimodal system can be defined as one that supports communica-
tion through different modalities or types of communication channels.
In general, multimodal systems are also considered to use concurrent
processing and to perform fusion of multiple, possibly asynchronous,
input streams. For example, a framework for multimodal human–
computer interfaces can be described as using a combination of modes
(e.g., languages), ...