  This paper proposes a novel multimodal fusion approach, aiming to produce
best possible decisions by integrating information coming from multiple media.
While most of the past multimodal approaches either work by projecting the
features of different modalities into the same space, or by coordinating the
representations of each modality through the use of constraints, our approach
borrows from both visions. More specifically, assuming each modality can be
processed by a separated deep convolutional network, allowing to take decisions
independently from each modality, we introduce a central network linking the
modality specific networks. This central network not only provides a common
feature embedding but also regularizes the modality specific networks through
the use of multi-task learning. The proposed approach is validated on 4
different computer vision tasks on which it consistently improves the accuracy
of existing multimodal fusion approaches.
