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of 85.24% in the first test set of the HR dataset. This is
illustrated in Figures 8(a,b), where presence of buildings (by
the mean of the covered area) is well detected.
However, we found that our model performs poorly with
questions regarding the relative positions of objects, such
as those illustrated in Figures 8(c-e). While Figure 8(c)
is correct, despite the question being difficult, Figure 8(d)
shows a small mistake from the model and Figure 8(e) is
completely incorrect. These problems can be explained by
the fact that the questions are on high semantic level and
therefore difficult for a model considering a simple fusion
scheme, as the one presented in section III.
Is it a rural or an urban area?
Rural RuralGround truth Prediction
Is it a rural or an urban area?
Urban UrbanGround truth Prediction
(a) LR, test set (b) LR, test set
Are there more water areas than
commercial buildings?
Yes NoGround truth Prediction
Are there less buildings than water areas?
No NoGround truth Prediction
(c) LR, test set (d) LR, test setFig. 9. Samples from the low resolution test set.
Regarding the low resolution dataset, rural/urban questions
are generally well answered (90% of accuracy), as shown
in Figure 9(a,b). Note that the ground truth for this type
of questions is defined as a hard threshold on the number
of buildings, which causes an area as the one shown in
Figure 9(b) to be labeled as urban.
However, the low resolution of Sentinel-2 images can be
problematic when answering questions about relatively small
objects. For instance, in Figures 9(c,d), we can not see any
water area nor determine the type of buildings, which causes
the model’s answer to be unreliable.
Generalization to unseen areas:
The performances on the second test set of the HR dataset
show that the generalization to new geographic areas
is problematic for the model, with an accuracy drop of
approximately 5%. This new domain has a stronger impact
on the most difficult tasks (counting and area computation).
This can be explained when looking at Figures 8(g-i). We can
see that the domain shift is important on the image space, as
a different sensor was used for the acquisition. Furthermore,
the urban organization of Philadelphia is different from that
of the city of New York. This causes the buildings to go
PRE-PRINT. FINAL VERSION IN IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING 10
Yes No Rural Urban 0 1-10 101-1000 1000+
Yes
No
Rural
Urban
0
1-10
11-100
101-1000
1000+11-100True
Predicted06544022980
Fig. 10. Confusion matrix for the low resolution dataset (logarithm scale)
on the test set. Red lines group answers by type (”Yes/No”, ”Rural/Urban”,
numbers).
undetected by the model in Figure 8(h), while the parkings
can still be detected in Figure 8(g) possibly thanks to the
cars. This decrease in performance could be reduced by
using domain adaptation techniques. Such a method could
be developed for the image space only (a review of domain
adaptation for remote sensing is done in [39]) or at the
question/image level (see [40], which presents a method for
domain adaptation in the context of VQA).
Answer’s categories:
The confusion matrices indicate that the models generally
provide logical answers, even when making mistakes
(e.g. it might answer ”yes” instead of ”no” to a question
about the presence of an object, but not a number). Rare
exceptions to this are observed for the first test set of the
HR dataset (see Figure 11(a)), on which the model gives 23
illogical answers (out of the 316941 questions of this test set).
Language biases:
A common issue in VQA models, raised in [41], is the fact
that strong language biases are captured by the model. When
this is the case, the answer provided by the model mostly
depends on the question, rather than on the image. To assess
this, we evaluated the proposed models by randomly selecting
an image from the test set for each question. We obtained an
overall accuracy of 73.78% on the LR test set, 73.78% on
the first test set of the HR dataset and 72.51% on the second
test set. This small drop of accuracy indicates that indeed,
the models rely more on the questions than on the image to
provide an answer. Furthermore, the strongest drop of accuracy
is seen on the HR dataset, indicating that the proposed model
extracts more information from the high resolution data.
Importance of the number of training samples:
We show in Figure 12 the evolution of the accuracies when the
model is trained with a fraction of the HR training samples.
When using only 1% of the available training samples, the
model already gets 65% in average accuracy (vs 83% for themodel trained on the whole training set). However, it can be
seen that, for numerical tasks (counts and area estimation),
larger amounts of samples are needed to achieve the perfor-
mances reported in Table III. This experiment also shows that
the performances start to plateau after 10% of the training data
is used: this indicates that the proposed model would not profit