Section: Research Program

Topological approach for multimodal data processing

Due to their geometric nature, multimodal data (images, video, 3D shapes, etc.) are of particular interest for the techniques we develop. Our goal is to establish a rigorous framework in which data having different representations can all be processed, mapped and exploited jointly. This requires adapting our tools and sometimes developing entirely new or specialized approaches.

The choice of multimedia data is motivated primarily by the fact that the amount of such data is steadily growing (with e.g. video streaming accounting for nearly two thirds of peak North-American Internet traffic, and almost half a billion images being posted on social networks each day), while at the same time it poses significant challenges in designing informative notions of (dis)-similarity as standard metrics (e.g. Euclidean distances between points) are not relevant.