Attention to clapping - a direct method for detecting sound source from video and audio

The research approaches utilizing ubiquitous sensors to support human activities have become one of the major interests lately. One of the required features of the ubiquitous sensor system is paying its attention to our signals, such as clapping hands and uttering keywords. To detect and localize these signs, it is useful to fuse visual and audio information. The sensor fusion in previous works is performed in the task-level layer through individual representations of the sensors. Therefore, it does not provide new information by fusing sensors. This paper proposes another method that fuses sensory signals based on mutual information maximization in the signal-level layer. The fused signal provides us new information that cannot be obtained from individual sensors. As an example, this paper shows two experimental results of a sound source localization by audio-visual fusion.