Speech emotion recognition combining linguistic content and audio signals in the dialog is a challenging task. Nevertheless, previous approaches have failed to explore emotion cues in contextual interactions and ignored the long-range dependencies between elements from different modalities. To tackle the above issues, this letter proposes a multimodal speech emotion recognition method using audio and text data. We first present a contextual transformer module to introduce contextual information via embedding the previous utterances between interlocutors, which enhances the emotion representation of the current utterance. Then, the proposed cross-modal transformer module focuses on the interactions between text and audio modalities, adaptively promoting the fusion from one modality to another. Furthermore, we construct associative topological relation over mini-batch and learn the association between deep fused features with graph convolutional network. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has attracted widespread research attention recently. Most MSA studies are based on the assumption of modality completeness. However, many inevitable factors in real-world scenarios lead to uncertain missing modalities, which invalidate the fixed multimodal fusion approaches. To this end, we propose a Unified multimodal Missing modality self-Distillation Framework (UMDF) to handle the problem of uncertain missing modalities in MSA. Specifically, a unified self-distillation mechanism in UMDF drives a single network to automatically learn robust inherent representations from the consistent distribution of multimodal data. Moreover, we present a multi-grained crossmodal interaction module to deeply mine the complementary semantics among modalities through coarse- and fine-grained crossmodal attention. Eventually, a dynamic feature integration module is introduced to enhance the beneficial semantics in incomplete modalities while filtering the redundant information therein to obtain a refined and robust multimodal representation. Comprehensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves MSA performance under both uncertain missing-modality and complete-modality testing conditions.

Augmented reality for laparoscopic liver resection is a visualisation mode that allows a surgeon to localise tumours and vessels embedded within the liver by projecting them on top of a laparoscopic image. Preoperative 3D models extracted from Computed Tomography (CT) or Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging data are registered to the intraoperative laparoscopic images during this process. Regarding 3D-2D fusion, most algorithms use anatomical landmarks to guide registration, such as the liver's inferior ridge, the falciform ligament, and the occluding contours. These are usually marked by hand in both the laparoscopic image and the 3D model, which is time-consuming and prone to error. Therefore, there is a need to automate this process so that augmented reality can be used effectively in the operating room. We present the Preoperative-to-Intraoperative Laparoscopic Fusion challenge (P2ILF), held during the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2022) conference, which investigates the possibilities of detecting these landmarks automatically and using them in registration. The challenge was divided into two tasks: (1) A 2D and 3D landmark segmentation task and (2) a 3D-2D registration task. The teams were provided with training data consisting of 167 laparoscopic images and 9 preoperative 3D models from 9 patients, with the corresponding 2D and 3D landmark annotations. A total of 6 teams from 4 countries participated in the challenge, whose results were assessed for each task independently. All the teams proposed deep learning-based methods for the 2D and 3D landmark segmentation tasks and differentiable rendering-based methods for the registration task. The proposed methods were evaluated on 16 test images and 2 preoperative 3D models from 2 patients. In Task 1, the teams were able to segment most of the 2D landmarks, while the 3D landmarks showed to be more challenging to segment. In Task 2, only one team obtained acceptable qualitative and quantitative registration results. Based on the experimental outcomes, we propose three key hypotheses that determine current limitations and future directions for research in this domain.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has attracted widespread research attention recently. Most MSA studies are based on the assumption of signal completeness. However, many inevitable factors in real applications lead to uncertain signal missing, causing significant degradation of model performance. To this end, we propose a Robust multimodal Missing Signal Framework (RMSF) to handle the problem of uncertain signal missing for MSA tasks and can be generalized to other multimodal patterns. Specifically, a hierarchical cross modal interaction module in RMSF exploits potential complementary semantics among modalities via coarse- and fine-grained cross modal attention. Furthermore, we design an adaptive feature refinement module to enhance the beneficial semantics of modalities and filter redundant features. Finally, we propose a knowledge integrated self-distillation module that enables dynamic knowledge integration and bidirectional knowledge transfer within a single network to precisely reconstruct missing semantics. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two datasets, indicating that RMSF significantly improves MSA performance under both uncertain missing-signal and complete-signal cases.