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by [9] evaluated the possibility to adapt networks pre-trained
on large natural image databases (such as ImageNet [10]) to
classify hyperspectral remote sensing images. More recently,
[11] used an intermediate high level representation using recur-
rent attention maps to classify images. Object detection is also
often approached using deep learning methods. To this effect,
[12] introduced an object detection dataset and evaluated clas-
sical deep learning approaches. Methods taking into account
the specificity of remote sensing data have been developed,
such as [13] which proposed to modify the classical approach
by generating rotatable region proposal which are particularly
relevant for top-view imagery. Deep learning methods have
also been developed for semantic segmentation. In [14], the
authors evaluated different strategies for segmenting remote
sensing data. More recently, a contest organized on the dataset
of building segmentation created by [15] has motivated the
development of a number of new methods to improve results
on this task [16]. Similarly, [17] introduced a contest including
three tasks: road extraction, building detection and land cover
classification. Best results for each challenge were obtained
using deep neural networks: [18], [19], [20].
Natural language processing has also been used in remote
sensing. For instance, [21] used a convolutional neural
network (CNN) to generate classification probabilities for a
given image, and used a recurrent neural network (RNN) to
generate its description. In a similar fashion, [7] used a CNN
to obtain a multi semantic level representation of an image
(object, land class, landscape) and generate a description
using a simple static model. More recently, [22] uses an
encoder/decoder type of architecture where a CNN encodes
the image and a RNN decodes it to a textual representation,
while [23] projects the textual representation and the image to
a common space. While these works are use cases of naturallanguage processing, they do not enable interactions with the
user as we propose with VQA.
A VQA model is generally made of 4 distinct components:
1) a visual feature extractor, 2) a language feature extractor, 3)
a fusion step between the two modalities and 4) a prediction
component. Since VQA is a relatively new task, an important
number of methodological developments have been published
in both the computer vision and natural language processing
communities during the past 5 years, reviewed in [24]. VQA
models are able to benefit from advances in the computer
vision and automatic language processing communities for
the features extraction components. However, the multi-modal
fusion has been less explored and therefore, an important
amount of work has been dedicated to this step. First VQA
models relied on a non-spatial fusion method, i.e.a point-wise
multiplication between the visual and language feature vectors
[5]. Being straightforward, this method does not allow every
component from both feature vectors to interact with each
other. This interaction would ideally be achieved by multiply-
ing the first feature vector by the transpose of the other, but
this operation would be computationally intractable in practice.
Instead, [25] proposed a fusion method which first selects
relevant visual features based on the textual feature (attention
step) and then, combines them with the textual feature. In [26],
the authors used Tucker decomposition to achieve a similar
purpose in one step. While these attention mechanisms are
interesting for finding visual elements aligned with the words
within the question, they require the image to be divided in a
regular grid for the computation of the attention, and this is not
suitable to objects of varying size. A solution is presented in
[27], which learns an object detector to select relevant parts of
the image. In this research, we use a non-spatial fusion step to
keep the model part relatively simple. Most traditional VQA
works are designed for a specific dataset, either composed
of natural images (with questions covering an unconstrained
range of topics) or synthetic images. While interesting for
the methodological developments that they have facilitated,
these datasets limit the potential applications of such systems
to other problems. Indeed, it has been shown in [28] that
VQA models trained on a specific dataset do not generalize
well to other datasets. This generalization gap raises questions
concerning the applicability of such models to specific tasks.
A notable use-case of VQA is helping visually impaired
people through natural language interactions [29]. Images
acquired by visually impaired people represent an important
domain shift, and as such a challenge for the applicability
of VQA models. In [30], the authors confirm that networks
trained on generic datasets do not generalize to their specific
one. However, they manage to obtain much better results
by fine-tuning or training models from scratch on their
task-specific dataset.
In this study, we propose a new application for VQA,
specifically for the interaction with remote sensing images.
To this effect, we propose the first remote sensing-oriented
VQA datasets, and evaluate the applicability of this task on
remote sensing images. We propose a method to automatically
PRE-PRINT. FINAL VERSION IN IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING 3
Elements catalog
Road
Water area
Commercial building
Industrial building
Residential area
Retail
Religious areaLand usages
...Attributes catalog
Relations catalog
PositionalSizeShape Count