Soft data issues in fusion of video surveillance

We present a number of ldquomeaningrdquo elements carried by possible spoken dialogue texts. All of them are well known within linguistics, semantics, formal language disciplines and philosophy of language and several formal models have already been given in the past. We also show how any concept of meaning goes far beyond lexicon and ldquogrammarrdquo, involving at least world knowledge, but also attitudes, emotions and intentions. We finally focus on the role that can be played by visual information in resolving problematic linguistic forms and augmenting knowledge about a human-human interaction scenario. In particular, the acoustical stimuli which persons are exposed to always have correlated visual cues on the face. In addition, we also postulate how visual cues can be useful in disambiguating a dialogue by providing contextual information thus fusing soft and hard data.