Cited by 456Multimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network Applications

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 280 of the 280 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; none of the 144 sources its claims cite is checked for support yet.

A survey on deep multimodal learning for computer vision: advances, trends, applications, and datasets

Open access

Abstract

The research progress in multimodal learning has grown rapidly over the last decade in several areas, especially in computer vision. The growing potential of multimodal data streams and deep learning algorithms has contributed to the increasing universality of deep multimodal learning. This involves the development of models capable of processing and analyzing the multimodal information uniformly. Unstructured real-world data can inherently take many forms, also known as modalities, often including visual and textual content. Extracting relevant patterns from this kind of data is still a motivating goal for researchers in deep learning. In this paper, we seek to improve the understanding of key concepts and algorithms of deep multimodal learning for the computer vision community by exploring how to generate deep models that consider the integration and combination of heterogeneous visual cues across sensory modalities. In particular, we summarize six perspectives from the current literature on deep multimodal learning, namely: multimodal data representation, multimodal fusion (i.e., both traditional and deep learning-based schemes), multitask learning, multimodal alignment, multimodal transfer learning, and zero-shot learning. We also survey current multimodal applications and present a collection of benchmark datasets for solving problems in various vision domains. Finally, we highlight the limitations and challenges of deep multimodal learning and provide insights and directions for future research.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This survey reviews deep multimodal learning for computer vision, organizing advances into six perspectives: multimodal data representation, multimodal fusion (traditional and deep learning-based), multitask learning, multimodal alignment, multimodal transfer learning, and zero-shot learning. It also surveys applications and benchmark datasets and highlights limitations and challenges including dimensionality/data conflict, data availability, and real-time processing/scalability.

Key findings

  • The survey organizes deep multimodal learning into six topics: multimodal data representation, multimodal fusion (traditional and deep learning-based schemes), multitask learning, multimodal alignment, multimodal transfer learning, and zero-shot learning.
  • It reviews conventional fusion methods (early, late, hybrid, kernel-based, graphical models, canonical correlation analysis) and deep fusion methods based on DBNs, DAEs, CNNs, RNNs, GANs, and attention mechanisms, noting model-specific tradeoffs such as DBNs largely ignoring spatiotemporal cues, DAEs missing spatiotemporal details, CNNs requiring large-scale multimodal datasets, RNNs having slow convergence, and GANs/attention being unstable to train.
  • It surveys multimodal applications including object detection, visual tracking, semantic segmentation, human/face recognition, image retrieval, gesture recognition, image captioning, vision-and-language navigation, embodied question answering, video question answering, style transfer, medical data analysis, and autonomous systems. Table 2 reports prior best results such as face recognition on LFW (ACC = 98.43%) and CASIA-WebFace (ACC = 99.02%), gesture recognition on SKIG (ACC = 97.8%), video question answering on TDIUC (ACC = 88.20%), and autonomous systems on nuScenes (mAP = 28.9%; NDS = 44.9%).
  • It presents benchmark datasets including RGB-D Object (300 object instances, 51 categories, 250,000 RGB-D images), BigBIRD (125 objects, 600 RGB-D point clouds, 600 12-megapixel images), Kinetics-400 (more than 300,000 video sequences across 400 classes), SceneNet RGB-D (5M RGB-D images), and nuScenes (1000 scenes, each about 20 s long, 23 classes, eight attributes).

Methods

  • Survey/overview paper; no new experiments are reported. It reviews and synthesizes literature, compares its scope with previous surveys in Table 1, and organizes the field into six perspectives.
  • It uses tables to summarize reviewed deep multimodal learning surveys, multimodal applications with technical details and best results (Table 2), and frequently used multimodal datasets (Tables 3 and 4), focusing on visual modalities such as RGB-D and RGB-optical flow.
  • The main analysis is qualitative synthesis and taxonomy; no primary data collection, statistical meta-analysis, or systematic review protocol is stated.

Limitations

  • The paper states main challenges of deep multimodal learning: dimensionality and data conflict, data availability, and real-time processing and scalability. It also states that despite impressive results, “no absolute conclusions can be drawn.”
  • It lists model-specific limitations: DBNs largely ignore spatiotemporal cues and have computationally intensive inference; DAEs miss some spatiotemporal details and have many hidden parameters with time-consuming inference; CNNs require large-scale multimodal datasets and time-consuming inference; RNNs have slow convergence; GANs are unstable and tricky to train on discrete distributions; attention mechanisms have unstable training and a huge number of parameters.
  • Evident from the text: as a survey, it does not provide new empirical validation or a quantitative meta-analysis beyond reporting prior results, and it does not state a systematic review protocol or inclusion criteria.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1007/s00371-021-02166-7

Cites

280 of 280 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

0 of 144 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged

Show all 41 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 120
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 28
128 of 128
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    A majority of contemporary machine learning applications use multiple modalities, such as visual and textual data.

    “However, most modern machine learning applications involve more than one modality (e.g., visual and textual modalities), such as embodied question answering, vision-and-language navigation, etc.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The absence of labeled multimodal data in the literature can reduce flexibility and accuracy.

    “Moreover, the lack of labeled multimodal data in the current literature can lead to reduced flexibility and accuracy, often requiring cooperation between different modalities.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Using multiple sensors as multimodal data sources yields complementary and richer information and can outperform a single input.

    “The main reason for using multimodal data sources is that it is possible to extract complementary and richer information coming from multiple sensors, which can provide much more optimistic results than a single input.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Deep multimodal learning's success has been driven by large multimodal datasets, powerful GPU-equipped computers, and high-quality multi-scale feature representations.

    “The success of deep multimodal learning techniques has been driven by many factors that have led many researchers to adopt these methods to improve model performance. These factors include large volumes of widely usable multimodal datasets, more powerful computers with fast GPUs, and high-quality feature representation at multiple scales.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Training a deep model from scratch requires a large amount of labeled data to achieve an acceptable level of performance.

    “Typically, training a deep model from scratch requires a large amount of labeled data to achieve an acceptable level of performance.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The amount of labeled data samples for effective model training is often insufficient to recognize all possible object categories in an image.

    “In practice, the amount of labeled data samples for effective model training is often insufficient to recognize all possible object categories in an image (i.e., seen and unseen classes).”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    In some vision applications, such as autonomous driving, security, and video surveillance, real-time conditions become necessary.

    “However, in some vision applications, such as autonomous driving, security, video surveillance, etc., real-time conditions become necessary.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Most facial recognition systems, including biometric systems, are limited by a lack of universality and by variations in the appearance of visual patterns.

    “However, most facial recognition systems, including biometric systems, suffer from a restriction in terms of universality and variations in the appearance of visual patterns.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Most current scene-content analysis methods cannot handle information that is not usable in real-life contexts.

    “However, most current scene-content analysis methods are still limited in their ability to deal with information that is not usable in real-life contexts.”
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Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • Application-table continuation is labeled Table 3

    Minor

    The rows under "Table 3 continued" list applications, fusion schemes, and results, continuing the material identified as Table 2 rather than the dataset table described as Table 3.

  • CNN introduction dated both 1998 and 2012

    Minor

    The paper describes LeCun et al.'s convolutional neural networks in 1998, but later says the CNN model was introduced by Krizhevsky et al. in 2012.

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Citations

Cites

Items 201–280 of 280

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 6

  1. Bayoudh, K.: From machine learning to deep learning, (1st ed.), Ebook, ISBN: 9781387465606 (2017)
  2. Wang, M., Deng, W.: Deep Face Recognition: A Survey. arXiv:1804.06655 (2019) · arXiv
  3. Salakhutdinov, R., Hinton, G.: Deep Boltzmann machines. In: Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pp. 448–455 (2009)
  4. Escalera, S., Athitsos, V., Guyon, I.: Challenges in multimodal gesture recognition. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 17, 1–54 (2016)
  5. Yue, L., et al.: Attentional alignment network. In: BMVC (2018)
  6. Srivastava, N., et al.: Multimodal learning with deep Boltzmann machines. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 15, 2949–2980 (2014)

Cited by

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Metadata

Authors
Bayoudh, K., Knani, R., Hamdaoui, F., & Mtibaa, A.
Affiliations
University of Monastir (TN)
Corresponding author
Bayoudh, Khaled
Venue
The Visual Computer
Published
2021-06-10
Volume
38
Issue
8
Pages
2939-2970
ISSN
  • 0178-2789 (ISSN-L)
  • 1432-2315
OpenAlex
W3168463823
Cited by
456
References
280
Citations by year
2026: 70 · 2025: 148 · 2024: 119 · 2023: 70 · 2022: 42 · 2021: 7
FWCI
21.32
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • The Visual Computer (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
multimodal fusion, multimodal representation, multi-task learning, multimodal alignment, zero-shot learning, multimodal dataset

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