Multimodal emotion recognition is an emerging interdisciplinary field of research in the area of affective computing and sentiment analysis. It aims at exploiting the information carried by signals of different nature to make emotion recognition systems more accurate. This is achieved by employing a powerful multimodal fusion method. In this study, a hybrid multimodal data fusion method is proposed in which the audio and visual modalities are fused using a latent space linear map and then, their projected features into the cross-modal space are fused with the textual modality using a Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory-based evidential fusion method. The evaluation of the proposed method on the videos of the DEAP dataset shows its superiority over both decision-level and non-latent space fusion methods. Furthermore, the results reveal that employing Marginal Fisher Analysis (MFA) for feature-level audio-visual fusion results in higher improvement in comparison to cross-modal factor analysis (CFA) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA). Also, the implementation results show that exploiting textual users' comments with the audiovisual content of movies improves the performance of the system.

Lip feature extraction is one of the most challenging tasks in the lip reading systems' performance. In this paper, a new approach for lip contour extraction based on fuzzy clustering is proposed. The algorithm employs a stochastic cost function to partition a color image into lip and non-lip regions such that the joint probability of the two regions is maximized. First, the mouth location is determined and then, lip region is preprocessed using pseudo hue transformation. Fuzzy c-means clustering is applied to each transformed image along with b components of CIELAB color space. To delete the clustered pixels around lip, an ellipse and a Gaussian mask were used. In order to show the performance of the proposed method, the pseudo hue segmentation and fuzzy c-mean clustering without preprocessing are compared. The compared methods were applied to the VidTIMIT and M2VTS databases and the results show the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with other methods.

Objective:The aim of this study was to investigate how the release of fluoride from two compomers and a fluoridated composite resin was affected by exposure to KF solution.Material and Methods:Two compomers (Dyract AP and Compoglass F) and one fluoridated composite (Wave) were prepared as discs (6 mm diameter and 2 mm thick), curing with a standard dental lamp. They were then stored in either water or 0.5% KF for 1 week, followed by placement in water for periods of 1 week up to 5 weeks total. Fluoride was determined with and without TISAB (to allow complexed and decomplexed fluoride to be determined), and other ion release (Na, Ca, Al, Si, P) was determined by ICP-OES.Results:Specimens were found not to take up fluoride from 100 ppm KF solution in 24 h, but to release additional fluoride when stored for up to five weeks. Compomers released more fluoride cumulatively following exposure to KF solution (p<0.001), all of which was decomplexed, though initial (1 week) values were not statistically significant for Dyract AP. Other ions showed no variations in release over 1 week, regardless of whether the specimens were exposed to KF. Unlike the compomers, Wave showed no change in fluoride release as a result of exposure to KF.Conclusions:Compomers are affected by KF solution, and release more fluoride (but not other ions) after exposure than if stored in water.