Advances in Multimodal Data Fusion and Its Applications

Dear Colleagues,

In the era of artificial intelligence, the proliferation of heterogeneous data sources, ranging from visual and auditory signals to textual and sensor data, has rendered unimodal analysis insufficient for complex decision-making tasks. Multimodal Data Fusion has emerged as a pivotal field, offering the potential to synthesize complementary information to enhance system robustness, accuracy, and interpretability. Despite significant progress driven by deep learning and Transformer-based architectures, critical challenges remain in semantic alignment, handling missing modalities, scalability, and ensuring privacy across distributed systems.

This Special Issue, titled "Advances in Multimodal Data Fusion and Its Applications," will consolidate cutting-edge research that advances the computational foundations of Multimodal Data Fusion and novel applications. It will bridge the gap between theoretical fusion methodologies and real-world deployment. This Special Issue will also feature original research articles and case studies that address novel fusion algorithms, representation learning, cross-modal retrieval, and various applications.

Topics of interest:

• Novel deep learning architectures for multimodal integration (e.g., Cross-modal Transformers);
• Fusion strategies under uncertainty, noise, and missing data conditions;
• Applications in precision healthcare, autonomous driving, and smart IoT systems;
• Explainable and trustworthy multimodal AI;
• Privacy-preserving federated multimodal learning.

We invite researchers, practitioners, and industry experts to submit high-quality contributions that explore both the foundational advances and the transformative applications of Multimodal Data Fusion.

Dr. Xiaoming Zhang
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.